


Strange Gods

by LusBeatha



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Character, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Haphazard Mess of Silm Canon and HoME Canon, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-chronological Flashback Dumps, Plant-medicine Without Plot, Sloppy Misuse of Mythology, That One Sentient Fox, The Loopholes and Customs of the Eldar, The Void
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 00:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 45,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16882359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LusBeatha/pseuds/LusBeatha
Summary: The poison in Eöl's knife prevents Aredhel from answering the call of Mandos, Maglor tells bedtime stories to hobbit children, and it seems that the Gods have plans that Maedhros could never have anticipated.  Meanwhile, the Shire is being Scoured, and a New Shadow is on the rise.





	1. Prologue

“Our lives were spun,” Anairë explains, “just as they were sung.  It was Vairë, who spun and wove them.  She spun the threads of our _fëar_ into the fabric of each _hröa_.”  She is braiding her daughter’s hair, tight plaits laced with little silver rings and held with white ribbons.  Her hands are quick, deft, strong: Aredhel feels as though she is being woven into place on a loom.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”  Aredhel is fidgeting in her chair by the window.  Tirion rises like a mountain of lanterns around them: towers and arches are gilded with the dancing light of candles and wide hearth-fires.  Laurelin’s golden aura makes the white stone appear almost sentient.  “How can it be _both_?”

“You are always so full of questions!” Anairë laughs, and she brushes a kiss against the top of her daughter’s head as she runs a hand over the careful lattice of braids there, to show that this is not a reproach.  “That is good.  You are a true Ñoldo.” She pauses.  “Vairë wove the shrouds of Nienna and Mandos, and she weaves the story of the World as unfolding cloth in Námo’s halls.  But she weaves more than the Past.  She wove your _hröa_ , just as Este made it hale, just as Nessa gave it the power to dance.  But I made your _hröa_ , too.  And the Valar were not in my belly, making you – not _literally,_ we’d say – but still they are involved in the fate of all the matter of the world _._ And now you yourself are moving the story of your hröa: with the sights and sounds you perceive, with the free will that Ilúvatar gave to you.”

Aredhel squirms and stares longingly out the window, more than ready to scamper off into the woods or gardens with her cousins.

 “Please, Írissë, hold still,” Anairë murmurs, “You’re worse than Findekáno.”  She starts on another braid.  “You are living in the land of the Gods who sang a world into the Timeless Void.  You are a little piece of song, and a little piece of matter.  And Time Itself grows ever longer, like a thread spun on a wheel,” she finished another braid, “and all these strands of experience are coming together in you.”

Anairë reaches the end of her final braid, twisting it around another and pinning it in place.  “Sometimes things don’t have an easy explanation.  Some things are both true _and_ a story.  Some stories come from books: those are written in your uncle's tengwar, and the loremasters keep them.  But some stories come out of our _hröar_ : those are the stories that our foremothers learned about the world when they awoke at Cuiviénen, and we cannot always write them down in a way that makes sense.  Some things we know, but cannot put into Quenya.  And if the Valar could, well.”  She smiles: a mysterious smile that Aredhel is too young to understand.  “Sometimes the Valar keep their secrets.”

She steps lightly in front of her daughter, evaluating her handiwork, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her forehead and pinning it in place.  “And to weave the experience of a _hröa_ is like braiding: it takes time, and patience.  On your part, and the Lady Vairë’s as well.  She wove a story for you, at the beginning, and what she wove is Fate.  But there are three things that are woven.  And at this very moment, you are weaving a new Becoming, a new Unfolding.”

Aredhel is listening and yet not listening, fidgeting with a small square of loose-woven fabric in her hand, wiggling her bare feet against the stone floor, and hoping that her mother will be done talking soon.

“The third thing that is Woven,” Anairë tells her, “is your karma, your debt, your doom.  And of that, you must be very careful.  Because Doom is a tricky weaver, like a spider: she can spin webs that are perfect, concentric, that glow like silver when they catch the light.  But when she catches a fly, the fly is stuck.  Remember that.”

“Yes, _Amil_.”  In fact, she has almost forgotten it by the time the words leave her lips.  Laurelin is streaming through the windows like molten gold.

“Well.”  Anairë chortles affectionately at her daughter’s impatience.  “Try not to scuff up those braids too quickly, if you will.  And you tell your cousin that you are not his plaything.  If he wants to play at hunting, he can take _his_ turn being the fox.”

Celegorm is waiting for her outside already, arms crossed, leaning against his great hound who is almost larger than he is.  And soon there are bramble-leaves stuck in her hair, and dirt under her fingernails, and she has forgotten all about weavers and spiders and destiny and fate.

 

*

 

She sweats and shivers.  The high, arched ceilings of Gondolin swim overhead like oceanwaves of carved stone; Aredhel feels that she could fall into them, face first, and be drowned.  She calls her husband’s name, frantic and dizzy, half-conscious.  “Eöl!  Eöl, I – ”

Someone enters the room, an elf-woman who she does not recognize.  There was a time that she would have recognized every elf in the city.  “My lady, are you not – ”

“My husband,” she gasps, “please, I need my husband.”

“It is not permitted, Lady, you know this.  Like as not he will be pardoned in the morning.  But my lady, are you not well?  May I –”  She holds a hand to Aredhel’s brow, inhales in surprise.

Her touch is like ice, and Aredhel tries to jerk her head away.  The Eldar are not meant to be susceptible to sickness, and the waves of cold and nausea through her body are foreign and terrifying.  The little amulet of mandrake-root and dried flowers of rue that she always keeps hung around her neck, feels as though it might choke her, but she cannot move to pull it off.

“My Lady, you are burning up.  I will send for a healer.”  The voice is disembodied now, unless it belongs to one of the little sculptures carved into the walls.  She blinks, trying to focus her gaze.  A statue of Varda, laid with thin lines of gold, is molded into the supporting beam nearest the bed; but Varda should not look so sinister, licking her lips, eyes narrowed.

Aredhel shivers, grabs at the little fidget-square of loose-knit fabric that she has kept tucked inside the pocket or bodice of every dress she has ever worn, ever since the day Vairë herself once pressed it into her nervous palm and said, _here, child this may help._   The fabric has not been worn ragged by time.  She clenches her fingers into the loops of the yarn as though reaching for Valinor itself.  The lights are flickering madly, unless perhaps it is she who flickers.

She is aware that she should know what to do – which plants will slow the wild pounding of her heart – but her _fëa_ is floating in a blinding fog.  She needs Eöl – he will know how to grind together the right herbs, with his careful, steady hands.  He will sing all the right prayers.  He will hold her with his strong arms and call her _my princess_ and _my beautiful witch_ , he will know how to clear this strange darkness in her vision.  Her husband understands darkness.  “My son,” she calls, and her voice is strange in her ears, as though it is not her own.  “Please… where is my son.”

He comes like a shadow, sullen and terrified, demanding answers of the healers.  His form swims in and out of her vision, as vast as a Vala and then smaller than a cat.  The tunic that they have lent to him is clearly Gondolin-made, the colors too bright; Eöl would never have let his son dress so.  Someone pulls back her sleeve and finds dark veins like an ink of spiderweb, trailing away from the wound at her shoulder.  She grabs for Maeglin blindly, the way he reached for her as a child; his wan, shocked face comes in and out of her vision like a moon in eclipse.  He strokes her hair uncertainly.  His fingers are stiff and trembling.

“No, no,” he is saying to a questioning healer, his voice shocked and empty, like the look in his eyes as his father threw the knife.  “He taught me indeed, but there is no true antidote.  I – it is – it is already – ”  He does not say _too late_ , but she hears it on the air, like the click of spider-fangs against the wall.  She has never heard her son stutter like this.  His hands are cool and strong against her feverish skin.  “Please – you must take me to my father – he may know something that will slow the poison – please – ”

There is a sound of blurred voices and hurrying feet, but Maeglin is still beside her.  She tries to open her eyes, only to realize that they _are_ open, and the world has gone dark.  Aredhel shudders at the unreal crawl of spiders, creeping out of her marrow and across every inch of her skin; she begins to claw and pick at her face, wild and frantic, biting down hard on the knuckles of her thumb to steady herself.

Maeglin takes her wrists and holds them down.  “Shhh, Mother, it will be alright, it will be alright.”  She knows his voice, because it sounds like her own: her empty whispers of _hush, it will be alright,_ all those years ago, as she clung the struggling and screaming Idril to her chest, while sheets of ice shrouded Elenwë’s body.

Time itself seems to disintegrate.  “ _Mother, what can I do.  Please, tell me what I can do_.”  He didn’t sound like the brave young elf who had smugly insisted that he was more talented than his father and had no more need of his homeland.  His voice had a strange lilt, like the first time he’d been stung by a bee as a child, staunchly pretending that he was not trying not to weep.

Somewhere amidst the thrashing fever-dream, she thinks: _I am supposed to be in the woods.  I am supposed to be so deep into the trees that they block out the sun._ She tries to stand, or she thinks she does, but her _hröa_ does not move.

The last thing she sees is a tattered wisp of cobweb, clinging to the corner of the ceiling, and a cloud crossing the moon outside the window.

Then, she is torn apart.  _Torn_ is the word: torn like cloth, frayed to bits, like fabric made back into thread, thread made back into raw fiber, unwoven.

This is what dying is like: the eye of a hurricane, while all of Arda swirls around her like raindrops in a high wind.

This is what dying is like: that tiny splitting noise when your fingernails pinch off the stem of a lily and lay its detached form in your basket.

This is what dying is like: spiderwebs, snarling her hair like threads of wind.  No – that is not what dying should have been like.  She tries to look, but she cannot see; she has left her eyes when she left her hröa.  And she cannot hear the world, but she can hear a terrible ticking and clicking like a thousand knitting-needles, like tooth against fang, like the rattle of divination-bones against the hearth of Eöl’s hall.

She cannot see, but she can See, and she cannot hear, but she can Hear.  _You have been Summoned._   First it sounds like Mandos, but he is not angry, as he was when he spoke their great Curse, and that itself startles her.  But then the voice is Arakáno, and he is reaching a hand toward her.  She knows that the hand is there, but then it seems to be her grandfather’s.  She tries to reach for it, this hand out of the West, and the voice is saying _it is time to come home_ – and there is another voice, Nienna’s, wailing wildly, the way she did for the trees, keening a bridge out of song that she must follow, West, West –

But her fëa is shrouded, caught, like being wrapped all in sticky spider-threads, pulling her eastward.  And she knows without seeing that she is flying over Nan Dungortheb – that she is going the wrong way.

 

*

 

The loremasters admit: we are all given the choice to refuse Mandos, and sometimes we are given no choice at all.  They shroud this fact in warnings: _Moringotto will snatch up your soul!_  It is rather like how the Avari tell their children: _don’t wander too far into the spider-woods alone, or the mother of spiders will eat you._ They did not have this saying in Valinor; there was no need.

Some things there are that cannot be predicted; some stories are too strange for the laws of the lorebooks.  At least one family of men can turn into a bear, though no one asks why; some swords are permitted to speak twice or hounds thrice.  A strange creature with the _hröa_ of a man can fight barrow-wights with songs that sound like those of hobbit-children.  Aredhel knows all of this, now, though she will return to Valinor to ask about it.

There are three Fates that weave the world, and the first is Vairë: she alone knows the future, for she has woven outside of Time.  And the next is Miriel mother of Fëanor, she who was once an elf but shall never return.  And she weaves alongside Vairë, and keeps the memory of all things that Happen, and holds the grief of the Noldolantë in the patterns of her threads.  And their tapestries adorn the halls of the dead.

But the third Weaver of Fate is Ungoliant: she who jumps from mountain to mountain on spider-threads, who weaves shadows so thick that they block out the light of the stars.  Vairë wove Destiny, but it was the Spiders who wove this Doom that is stranger than anyone could have prepared her for.  They wove the nets in which Eöl ensnared his wife, and they wove Aredhel a new hröa from the tip of a poisoned fang.  Ungoliant was a weaver, after all: she wove a darkness that was darker than Morgoth could have conceived.  The lorebooks have a lot to say about the great Spider and her brood, but what She was, or how she came to crawl in from some deep region of the Timeless Void – well, they are vague on that point.

This knowledge the grandmothers keep, while the bards are too busy with their harps and calligraphy to think of spools and distaffs: life was woven of music; it was sung in fine threads.  Sometimes that Fate spreads itself across the path of dreams: a shimmering tapestry of heart-gasping sorrow, ever-weaving itself in stone and flesh, in dance, in ocean and song.  All of Time, made into cloth.

Sometimes, when Aredhel goes walking through the gnarled Old Forest at sunrise, she sees Tom Bombadil splashing through the river in his boots, collecting bundles of forget-me-nots, while she herself gathers baskets of coltsfoot and cautious roots of hemlock.  And she bows her head respectfully, and he tips his hat, and the river Herself smiles at them as she bubbles over her bed of stones and refracts the gentle dawn-light.

And the question of _what I literally am_ means much less than what she is doing – and what she is doing, she supposes, is That Which Was Woven.


	2. How the Entwives Found Their Wives

## The Old Forest, Third Age 3018, August

A gathering of entwives is a rather less formal and more effective affair than a Moot of their lost husbands, for entwives love less the sounds of their own voices and are more inclined to prioritize practical solution of the matter at hand.  They are gathered together in a circle, on the edge of the Old Forest just beyond the Hedge, in the paired way that they often sit: wives leaning against their own wives, their legs and shoulders brushing casually as the branches of trees and bushes entwine in the forest.  Hawthorn has a hand gently resting over Willow’s, as though to steady her, and Witch-hazel with her crown of bittersweet-berries rests against Horse-Chestnut’s broad shoulders.

First, Oak expresses some worries about abuse of trees in the fields beyond the Old Mill: trees cut and shredded to bits and left there, fallen scraps of what they had once been.  Needless death.

“No one has stopped to harvest the fruits of my trees, this year.”  Hawthorn’s voice is as astringent as those small, hard fruits, the color of dried blood, that flow down around her face like hair.  “Their hearts are growing cold and hard.”

And then Fir says: “The sparrows are flocking to me, begging for help.  Their homes destroyed.” 

“They will come back into the Forest again.”  Willow, never one to sit still, is digging the toes of her smooth rootlike feet into the ground. “They will burn our children’s flesh again.”  Her tone is proud and angry, but the few little voles she’s unearthed from the ground beneath her are crawling across her feet, unafraid.  She lifts a few and holds them in her hands, the touch of their small bodies seeming to calm her.

“They have spoken of such a thing already.”  Aredhel, ever the honorary ent-wife, is seated on a stone at her wife Alder’s feet, a pile of wet reeds laid out before her, weaving basket-handles with antsy fingers.  The ent-wives know her strange quirk, of needing to fidget in order to pay attention, and they do not scorn her for it.  But Willow’s eyes flash at this new piece of news.

 “Why do their parents do nothing?” asks Elm.  “Why do Bombadil and Goldberry sit in their house with bowls of lilies and iris, while the hearts of their folk are turned dark by the edge of the Shadow?”

“Bombadil would forget his own name if he were not always singing of it,” says Willow scornfully.  “And we may be coming to a time in which the hobbits destroy their land more quickly than we can help it grow!”

“That may be true,” Alder says sadly, shaking her head, absentmindedly stroking the branch of a nearby birch-tree as though she were petting a dog, “but if the hobbits cease to love their trees and their gardens, then this land will be lost no matter what we may do, I think; and the Enemy will have won, even though he may still yet be defeated.” Alder is short, for an ent-wife, with green leaves and trails of vibrant catkins that glow somehow brighter than those of their mute counterparts.  “It is not, I think, our place to rush suddenly into the realm of the Little Folk and demand they honor their trees.  You cannot get love by _demand._ ”

 “Why do the elves do nothing?” In her pent-up anger, Elm’s bark flexes like snakeskin, and her leaves rustle like an agreeing chorus.

Alder makes a sudden movement like a tree bent before a storm, but Hickory answers before she can.  “The elves are not doing _nothing_.”  Hickory sounds more sorrowful than defensive.  “The elves are _sailing_!  And in that I think, they have little choice.  But even now, those who pass through the Shire on their way to the havens play music on their harps.  And the hobbits who hear that music stand amazed, feeling a beauty in the woods that they have not felt before.  There is at least one elf who still lingers and teaches them the old songs, in such a way that hobbits understand.  But the hobbits are their own people, not some pets of the elves!  And the elves are _leaving_ , leaving or fading.  And you shall all fade, too, right back into trees of motionless memory, if you let your anger keep your cold hearts from singing.”

 “Like as not,” says Aredhel quietly, looking at the gap in the trees before her, “the hobbits shall all perish, and we as well.  And the Shadow shall stretch so far and so soon that we will _pray_ to the Valar for another wave to take our trees beneath the sea, and us with it!  There is no malice in the hobbits, only the forgetfulness that takes all mortals, and against that curse, anger is futile.”

“Protecting the forest has never been about denying that trees die, just as foxes die, just as the owl eats the vole.  The hobbits need new _seeds_ ,” says Alder, “for flowers that make their hearts sing with their beauty.  And they need trees that still remember how to sing.”

“We are the keepers of the trees, and not of the shire!  Our place is to defend our Forest and our trees who have spread beyond its borders, not to meddle in hobbit-politics, nor to defend tree-hewers from the shadow!”  Oak is the tallest of them, taller even than Elm, who is watching her wife intently and nodding along. 

 “So we do nothing,” say Willow, scornfully.  Hawthorn is holding her hand, now, which is possibly the only thing that keeps her from rising.  “We do nothing.  And the Shire will grow proud and cruel as a country of Men, and we will tell our children the trees: _At least you die singing!_ ”

“We fortify our borders.  We strengthen the hedge.  We cover over the forest-path with thistle and bramble.  We call those trees who can still walk, back home again.”  Oak and Elm have a way of speaking in perfect unison, both deep-voiced and melodic, both of them as tall while sitting down as Witch-Hazel or Alder would have been while standing. Their upper leaves are gathering sunlight above the roof of the forest, even as the others sit in their shade.

“I remember the forests of Beleriand,” Hawthorn says, “I remember how I loved them, and could do nothing but kiss my children and weep, and gather handfuls of seeds and roots as we ran from the rising Sea.  Maybe the hobbits are now touched by the shadow that lies on all of Arda, but _they are not that shadow_.”

Alder, who had been filling two great leaf-shaped vessels with water from a nearby spring in the rocks while the others were speaking, mummering a muffled prayer to Yavanna with her hand held over the liquid, now begins to pass these around.  “Please,” she scolds, “are we as indecisive as the Ents?”

A collective look of shame goes around the circle, and for a few moments there are only the sounds of the drinking-vessels being passed from ent-wife to ent-wife.

Aredhel has finished the last of her basket-handles.  “I’ve been invited to a birthday-party,” she says at last, her tone light.  “I have been teaching some of the younger hobbits to hunt and to weave, and helping in their little gardens.  There is so much _goodness_ in them, no matter the shortness of their collective memory!”

 “We are nothing if we cannot defend our children, and our children are the trees only, and not the hobbits, goodness or no.”  Horse-chestnut has been absentmindedly running her fingers along the yellow stars of her wife’s flowers.  “And in any case, we are no match for the Enemy, if He should take power again.  We can defend, and love, but we are not stronger than Fate.”

*

Aredhel has indeed been invited to a birthday party, and she could hardly tell you whether it was an accident.

It has been a hard year.  Strange travelers came up from the South, hungry and desperate and scornful of a place where hobbits seem to live in relative contentment.  Flocks of blackbirds fleeing the war in the south scream of deaths and destruction.

It had been midsummer, and Alder had had been busily holding acorns in her hands until they germinated, breathing on them gently.  She spoke soft prayers over them until them grew woody little trunks and unfurled a few new leaves, and then planted the ensuing red-oak saplings gently into holes in the earth.  She ran her hand over the green moss on the stones beside her, her gaze focused so intently that it was a tangible growing-force in the air, until its little axes rose to nearly twice their original height.

“We are just sitting here!” Aredhel was cutting conks from a nearby oak with such harsh, angry movements that Alder crouched down and held her hand between her wife and the tree-bark.  “I need to be _doing something_.” Aredhel’s hand quivered with repressed emotion, her grip tightened on the handle of the knife, hand frozen in midair, and then she set it down in the basket and leaned into her wife’s arms.  That same gnawing guilt that she’d once felt as she stood by helplessly while battle raged at the end of Second Age, had returned again. “We are just sitting here while the War stretches toward us like a great cloud of shadow over the land.  And what are we doing – hiding in our little hidden land and hoping we aren’t found?  I have done that before, Alder. _It did not end well._ ”  Alder’s skin was cold and smooth like the trees she loved and cared for, and her embrace was firm and steady.

_(Aredhel has always disliked being held by elvish arms.  The Eldar embrace one another casually and lovingly and never seem to ask permission.  It’s like being hit by a swarm of bees at unexpected moments.  No one else seems to feel this way._

_“There are no bees,” her father had told her._

_“I did not mean that there were literal bees!  It’s just a feeling.  When you hug me, there are little insects attacking my skin.”_

_“You have always had a good imagination,” he had said fondly, and within a week everyone had forgotten and was hugging her again.  Then Idril was clinging to her neck and the air was so cold that she did not have much time to think about it._

_Maeglin did not cling so much; he was like his mother, distant and disliking touch, loving the wild places of the earth.  “It feels wrong when you hug me,” he’d said once.  “Not you, Mother.  But being held all at once, without being told it’s going to happen.”  He said it like a confession._

_“O, L_ ó _mion, that is quite alright!  It happens to me, as well.  What if I hold you like this instead?”  And she’d sent a wave of love straight from her fëa to his._

_“Yes¸” he had said.  “That does not feel so bad.”_

_Alder’s touch does not bring the fire-bees.  She knows that her wife does not like eye-contact – it’s like a jolt of electricity, through me, it hurts! – and so she does not force it.)_

“It did not end well,” Aredhel repeated, the bite gone from her voice, “but I do not know what I could have done to change that.”

“We are not just sitting here,” Alder replied patiently.  “We are taking care of one of the last of the old-growth forests, and we are one of the only things between the little folk and the Shadow.  And they haven’t the faintest idea how to take care of themselves in war-time!  Have you ever seen a hobbit try to ration _anything_?”

“Only last week, one of the Brandybuck children saved his last mushroom for me!  I don’t think he knew that I had been the one to bring them in the first place.”

“Yes,” said Alder, with a wry smile on her pinkish lips.  “That is _exactly_ what we are protecting.”

*

And so she and Alder had begun to leave the forest again, to refill the seed-bins of farmers who had thought they would not make it through the year, to mend holes in baskets and restock pantries.  And the hobbits started to say again: _it is a good year!_

There were so many hobbits in Brandy Hall at any one time, that it was hardly difficult for an elf to slip in unnoticed.  The occasional sound of a person scurrying about through the back corridors was hardly new.  If you saw someone out of the corner of your eye and didn’t recognize them at first, you figured they were a cousin of a cousin and kept walking.

The trees over Brandy Hall, the ones that grow right into the side of the hill behind the main house, are so tall and fast-growing and laden with fruit, that it seems they can grow a whole new branch near the top, while you are still climbing around the lower branches.  There are stories that when the moon is new, the weeping-willows along the Brandywine will lift their heads out of the water and flounce their branches like long braids of hair, silvery as the absent moonlight.  This is, of course, one of the few times that Willow herself is willing to enter the Shire, in the deep darkness when the little mortals remain indoors.

In Brandy Hall, the mythic was also the ordinary; and they prided themselves in not having any time for the stuck-up nonsense of Hobbiton.  Gardens were never meant to be planted in such neat and even rows.  Elves on their way to the Havens will often stop by to offer wisdom or gifts, and sometimes when the Brandybucks are feeling particularly daring and venture past the Hedge, they return with stories of talking trees and elves who can walk on the surface of the river, hedgehogs that can speak with words, and so forth.

This is, Aredhel thinks, what it means to say that elves have _faded_.  They have faded in the way that Gods have faded.  They are of a status with mythic beings, and of the same dubious credibility.

This is all to say, that no one in Brandy Hall worries too much about _unusual_.

“Are you an Elf?” the hobbit-girl had asked.  They were in the Second Lower Kitchen, the one behind the spinning-room.  Aredhel had been softly singing to their potted herbs on the windowsills and restocking the pantry with mushrooms and wild greens from the Forest; this is the easiest way to be of help to the hobbits, who can never keep track of which of their hundreds of relations might have dropped off a basket of this or that.  Everything in Brandy Hall has always been more or less communal, a system that the Brandybucks prided themselves in and the rest of the Shire scoffed at.  But Aredhel had never been caught joining in, before this.

“I am indeed,” she had answered, still – still! after all this time – utterly unsure if this was, in fact, the truth.

“Did you want a cup of tea?” the girl had asked without hesitation.  “When my other elf comes, I always make him a cup of tea.”

It would have been very rude to refuse, of course.  She was caught off guard by the thought of _my other elf._

“I’m called Poppy Muggins-Brandybuck,” said the girl.

Aredhel blinked a few times.  It had been so terribly long since she had needed to introduce herself to anyone at all.  “And I am Alder,” she had said finally, the first name that came to mind, the entwife who was waiting for her on the other side of the Hedge.

“I’m _eight_ ,” said the girl, as she scurried to put the kettle over.  She’d turned around and given Aredhel a huge grin.  The tea-kettle must have weighed more than she did, but the making of tea is taught to hobbit-children from a very young age, and she managed it expertly.  “And I shall be nine, in six months’ time!” She said it in a tone that made this sound like a great accomplishment.

Aredhel tried to imagine responding to this statement in turn: _I am about ten thousand years old, I think –they changed the structure of time, when the sun first rose._ “You must be very wise,” she said at last, with a smile.  Aredhel had raised two children, after all, and they had both thought of themselves as _very wise_ by the time they were eight, despite this being quite a lot younger in elf-years.

 _Noldo,_ the lorebooks said, from _nol-, wise: wise in the sense of having great knowledge, rather than the making of wise decisions._   Let it never be implied that any Noldo has made one good decision, ever in the history of Arda.

“I am!” exclaimed the girl.  “I know all my letters, and I’ve made my samplers.  They’re on the wall in the sitting-room.”  She beamed with pride, and then her face fell slightly.  “I am doing a Brandybuck family tree, now,” she said, sounding a bit wistful, “but some of them have terribly long names.”  The girl wrapped a pot-holder around the handle of the great cast-iron kettle, lifted it, and filled the teapot.  She still had not asked why there was another elf in the kitchen of Brandy Hall.

“To stitch your family’s history is a noble task,” Aredhel had said gravely.

The girl wrinkled her nose.  “Maybe.  But my family’s not really so noble.”  She pulled a little bowl of sugar-cubes from a shelf in the corner, and set it on the table.  “When my other elf comes to visit,” she said shyly, as though afraid to offend, “he always wants sugar but not milk.”

“Then so shall I!” Aredhel exclaimed, smiling, taking a seat at the low table.  “Your other elf sounds like a wonderful friend.  Can you tell me his name?”’

Suddenly, Poppy looked very shy and embarrassed.  “I only, I call him Mr. Elf.  Because he’s the only one I know, Mrs. Alder, m’lady, begging your pardon.”

Aredhel did not press the matter.  “The elves say that embroidering is a sacred act,” Aredhel began carefully, having still not entirely picked up on the religious customs of the Shire.  “There is a goddess who stitches everything that has ever happened in the whole world, and everything that is happening, and everything that is going to happen.  She makes threads out of the stuff of Life Itself.  She sees everything that you have ever done, with her threads, and makes sure you are never forgotten.  So when you stitch your family’s names, you are imitating her, and honoring her.”

She thought suddenly of an old piece of fabric, maybe still sitting on a neglected shelf somewhere in her mother’s house: _Írissë, daughter of Nolofinwë, son of Finwë, High King of the Noldor, made This in the Year 1392, But She Would Rather Have Been Out In The Woods,_ around an intricate, stylized Emblem of Finwë.  Her mother’s laugh had been quiet, and almost sad.  “You know that whatever art or craft you choose to follow, I will support you.  You do not have to disrespect the lady Vairë to do so.  You have been spending too much time with your brothers and cousins, and they are teaching you that the tasks they consider beneath them, are not honorable.”  Aredhel had never thought of it that way, before.  “I know that you are happiest when you are hunting,” her mother had chastised, “but be careful how you think about that inside you head.  Oromë on his own could not have created all of Arda.”

“I think,” Aredhel told Poppy Muggins-Brandybuck, “that I could make it more fun for you, if you would let me teach you.  Would you like that?”  The tea was cloyingly sweet: a strange sensation after clear ent-droughts and bitter woodland teas.

Poppy had slipped three whole sugar-cubes into her mouth when she had thought that Aredhel was not paying attention, and so her answer was muffled.  “Oh _could_ you, Mrs. Elf, Lady Alder, I mean?  I would like that so very much.”  Her smile was wide and chipmunk-cheeked.

This is, more or less, how Aredhel came to be offering embroidery-lessons to an eager group of small hobbits whose mothers were only too glad to pretend they could not tell the difference between an elleth and a human woman.  And so long as she slipped in the back door, promptly on time, and never specified how she came to be there, well, Brandy Hall was Brandy Hall and nobody asked too many questions.

 

## Nan Elmoth, First Age 318

“You plant them when Tilion is full,” the dwarf-woman explains.  “That is when the seeds sprout more quickly, because the moon is like an egg.  A seed, ready to hatch.  When the Enemy has taken the moonlight, the plants grow slower.  You leave this one a drop of your blood, that one a cupful of wine, and that one a spoonful of honey.”

They are standing together in the gardens that grow in the watery sunlight some miles north of Eöl’s hall, where a small settlement of dwarves has migrated and settled for the fame of the elf’s smithcraft.  The dwarf-woman points at the plants and speaks very slowly, as if to a child.  Aredhel wants to shout _I met Tilion in Tirion, on the ground, he smiled at me and told my mother I was destined for great things – I was five years old, I’ve_ met _the moon, I was born before the moon rose into the sky –_

But the rules that she has learned don’t seem to apply here.

Aredhel had never met a dwarf, before she came to this place, so she is hardly sure what she had expected.  The woman’s hair is braided in a way that reminds her almost of Noldorin smiths, but more elaborate, and held in place with rings of the strange black metal of this land that her husband uses in his forge.  Her face is as weathered as rough-cut stone, like the most aged of mortals, but she maneuvers her way through the garden tirelessly.

“We stop and visit the moon when we fly to Mahal’s halls,” the dwarf elaborates in that same measured, careful voice.  “And when the moon is shining bright, they can bless our gardens – see?”  She cups a bloom of belladonna very softly in her hand, like the head of an infant.  “And then we have the medicines we need.”

“Yavanna made the nightshades, but Morgoth twisted them,” Aredhel recites quietly.  Anairë taught her this, hundreds of years and thousands of miles away.  “That is why they must be used so carefully.  Because they still have his dark magic inside.  The First Elves gathered the mandrake-roots in Cuiviénen, and brought them to Valinor.  But there they found that Este had kept the second mandrake, the one that he never touched: that plant is a protection against many curses, and does not bring such a dangerous twilight-sleep.”

“Dark magic!”  The dwarf laughs with a noise like a small avalanche in the mountains, as she pulls back a mess of thorny vines to reveal the mandrake behind.  It isn’t like the pale gold flowers that Aredhel remembers, rosy and surreal like the gardens of Estë, giving way to its shimmering yellow fruits like marbles.  This plant has wide, thick leaves that seem almost to swallow its deep purple flowers.  “You cannot harvest these,” she tells Aredhel carefully.  “Not even when they are ready, I mean.”

“My lady, I would never take from your garden without – ”

“You are the Lady of this house, and you will make medicine as you see fit.  But not these, not now.  You are not ready.”

Inside, she is screaming that she is the Lady of Gondolin and the eldest granddaughter of the first king of the Noldor and that she has crossed the Great Ice on foot and hunted polar bears and killed orcs with her bare hands, and hardly deserves to be treated as a child by a dwarf less than half her age.  But something holds her back.  The laws of Nature that she has learned, do not seem to apply here.  And the wisdom of Mortals is darker and stranger and truer than she could have imagined.

The next time the old dwarf-woman comes knocking on Eöl’s door, later in the autumn, Aredhel takes her out to her own little garden, where her flowers are still struggling to bloom after their dark year in the crippling shadows of the forest.  The woman touches a leaf, murmurs a prayer.  The next day, the trees around the cottage have pulled their branches away, and her little garden begins to green in the sun.

“How did you do that?”  They are sitting in the garden, pulling apart garlic bulbs for planting.  “The trees.  They obeyed you.  But it is as though they cannot hear me.  I thought the trees here must be mute.  And then a word from you, and they all step back.”  And you are a _dwarf_ , she does not add.

The woman laughs.  “You don’t speak their language, Princess.”

“I speak Sindarin,” she says, “and I am learning Khuzdul.  I am a friend of entwives.  I have spoken with trees before!”

This only makes the old dwarf laugh louder.  “You don’t speak _their_ language.”

She curls her hands into fists, bites her lip.  The laughter is becoming irritating.  “ _Yavanna_ speaks my language!” she exclaims.  “I’ve seen the Trees that used to light up the whole of Arda.  I’ve ridden in Oromë’s trail through the forests of Valinor.  I’ve seen Nessa dance amid the trees, and they danced along in joy.  Estë herself shows me plants in my dreams.”

When she responds, it is in that same infuriatingly patient tone.  “Do you think your tree-light reached here?  Do you think your shiny Trees reached down into this valley, where the spiders venture freely?  Does your Oromë ride here anymore?  Do you think your Gods made _me_?”

Aredhel stares down at the pile of garlic heaped in her skirt, abashed.  “But the trees still dance, she says softly.  I’ve seen them.”

“Yes,” says the dwarf pleasantly.  “There are stronger forces at work, in this world, than the guards of your secret city, princess.”

“How did you – ”

“Watch the trees,” the old woman tells her.  “Watch the fire; watch the stars.  And do not look for your old gods here.”

*

And time passes, and the seasons change, and they mulch their gardens with fallen leaves.  And spring comes again, and again.

One night, she thinks she understands.  “The trees are dancing at the full moon!  Yavanna must be here to dance with them.”

This is greeted, of course, with that same rumbly little laugh, like rocks spilling out of a mine-pit, like the stir of little quakes in the earth.

Aredhel is very accustomed, at this point, to being laughed at.  “But Nessa must be here, she says.  Yavanna must be here.”

“Yes,” says the dwarf-woman.  “Yes, they are here.  The trees _nessa_ on the full moon, and they _yavanna_ in the light of the sun.  That is what they do.  That is the force that has always driven them.”

Eventually, she realizes how patient the dwarf-healer has been with her.  How patient Eöl has been with her.

*

Later, when Aredhel tells snatches of this tale to the hobbit-children, the woman herself is a sturdy little mandrake-root, her wide, deep green leaves spilling over the top of her gnarled, hairy body.  A magic root who teaches her stories about the proper moon-phase for planting and harvesting.

Maybe it is true.  Maybe the dwarf-woman is a mandrake-root now.  Maybe she rode in the branches of migrating ents, when Beleriand was drowned, and her descendants still dig in the deep forests; or she joined the rest of her people in the mountains.

Maybe she drowned with her homeland.  Maybe the Valar didn’t care for her blasphemy.

 

## Nan Elmoth, First Age 332

She keeps the fire going, always, while snow gusts through the trees, a flutter of white flakes.  The servants would have done it, but she likes to stay near the flames.  She needs the fire to know her, to know her intimately and by name, so that it might share its secrets when she asks.  Little Maeglin sits by the fire with her, clutching at her shawl.  Eöl’s halls are carved out of wood in the way that she remembers Tirion being carved out of stone: intricate swirls and sigils set in every wall, the wood polished shiny and smooth.

“A long time ago,” she tells her son, “my family crossed an Ice so wide that it took us years and years.  My father led us, and he would not give in to the cold – he was strong and warm as a bear.  Sometimes children would go to sleep at night and the cold would carry them away to Mandos on feathery wings of snow.  And I would hold my little niece under my cloak, and wrap rags around my feet when my shoes gave way.  And when we reached again the land of the living, and our hearts thawed, and we rubbed the bittersweet-berries into our fingers and toes to make the blood flow again, I knew that I had come here for a reason, that I had passed through that terrible place because I have a part in this tale.  And you are a part of that, too.

“Your father thinks that we are weak, that we live in cities and cannot survive the wilds.  But we crossed the Great Ice, on foot.  There is a light in us, in the Noldorim,” she told him, “a light of the Trees that shone over our birth.  It is a light that comes from our roots, and makes us churn and bubble like this cauldron – ”  Aredhel pokes at the fire, and a wave of sparks leaps up around the bubbling soup-pot there.  “ – and those cauldrons inside us are always spinning, the flame of life rising to our lips, our hands, our eyes.”

Her son’s eyes shine, when she tells those tales.  The fierce pride of _being a Noldo_ has settled in his bones.

And when he gets older, he only wants her stories more, and in more detail.  Claiming his identity, he listens with his pointed ears pricked to attention, as he whittles wooden tools and she leans against the hearth, looking into the flames, and singing the Old Songs, the ones of which Eöl so disapproves, in her native tongue.

*

In Nan Elmoth, the trees are like coiled animals of a forgotten time, crouching in thick curtains of vines.  The alders that squat over the little river that run by their home, are denser than those of Mithrim or Valinor, seeming somehow to scowl more than other trees of her memory, though they do not speak.  She asks the trees for news of the ents, but to no avail.

But she begins to ask Eöl about the forest because when he is caught up in the telling, his face brightens like the sunlight at the end of a mine-shaft.  And so he teachers her the medicines and poisons that tendril through the iron fence that surrounded his halls: the plants that were, like elves to orcs, twisted into something altogether different, the plants that still held medicine but could send the taker into a spiral of darkness if not given the appropriate respect.  They are plants that she learned in Valinor, and yet not like this.  For his stories are fantastical, and wild: she scarce believes them, and dares not question them.

The silvery thornapples grew wherever the great spiders left their webs, Eöl teaches.  Henbane feed on the blood of the Eldar, but only those killed by the enemy; the stinking meadows of it, fluttering eerily like clouds of green bat-wings, were once settlements, now decimated.  The seeds of Monkshood fall wherever the Wolves of Angband have travelled.

“The gods here are not like your gods,” her husband tells her, and there is a sharp glint of pride in his eyes.

That is going too far.  “I’ve met the Valar in their own damn country,” she responds indignantly.  “There are no others.”

“The gods here are not like your gods,” he says again.  And those are the gods he teaches their son: different gods, and yet the same.   Irmo will snatch you up at night like a hungry thief, but there are plants that will let you venture down his path without harm.  Aulë lives in every mine, and you must always leave him the last bit of ore, in gratitude.  The sun and moon are cursed remnants of the Noldorin war, but when the moon is dark, Varda lights the sky with diamonds, and hers is the best light to work by.

He also teaches Maeglin that you must never trust an escaped thrall – the dark one sets them loose as spies, poor miserable creatures, and when occasionally they wander near to his hall, Eöl puts an end to them.  “They can never be trusted: their master has twisted them forever with torment and fear.  Twisted them, the way he twisted the wild carrot into the poisonous water-hemlock: but if you pick it at just the right time, and leave the right offering, it will save you from certain poisons.”

Aredhel stands by and says nothing.  She has seen the enemy’s marks left subtly in her husband’s ankle and behind his left ear; he knows she has, and they never once mention it.  Her husband thinks he was sent home because of his superior skill in smithcraft, though he never says so outright; and when he shows her his latest creations, and adorns her hair with white jewels whose like she could never before have imagined, she almost believes it.  She scarcely has the option not to.

But when Eöl is away at his forge, she tells her son that Irmo is wise and ever-moving, like a painting forever being painted; that Aulë loved the Noldor most of all, and taught them great wisdom, for he trusted them to use it well; that Varda herself helped to put the sun into the sky, and the sun is not the enemy of the stars.

 

## Brandy Hall, Third Age 3018, October

She is early, today.  The kitchen of Brandy Hall is warm, not only with the embers of the fire in the hearth, but with the paintings of bygone hobbits hung from the walls, and the muddy boots and child-sized cloaks hung in the corner by the door, next to nearly-stacked piles of bedding.  There always seem to be hobbits living and sleeping and eating in every possible room.  She settles down by the fire to warm her hands.

She has been living in the Old Forest for so long, fiercely in love with the rhythmic turn of the seasons and the deep knowledge and love of the plants and animals she eats, that the neat jars of flour and butter are a bewildering echo of a past she rarely thinks of.  The hobbits have left an assortment of charms on the mantle-piece: a bundle of mugwort, dried asphodel woven into a wreath, and the blooms of a few ancient yellow roses, brittle and gold-tinged, like little torn pieces of starlight, set in a glass bowl.  There is a broom leaned against the wall nearby, strong alder-wood woven with hemp-thread.

 _(“How do you_ stand _it?” she had asked Alder once._

_“How do you stand to exist?  How do you eat deer?  How do you make medicine from the plants that you yourself nourished in your own garden?  How does the henbane that sprouts from the battlefield stand to live off the blood of Eru’s children?”)_

Her dress is white and silver, the tough old fabric she had woven herself, in Nan Elmoth when the world was younger.  She’d woven it from strong nettle-fibers and the dried petals of white roses, and threads of the strange metals her son had brought back to show her, after a visit to the dwarves – “look, it is so light, lighter than thread!”  She’d sewn his leather armor, too, piece by piece, with the hides of elk and bear he’d brought back from hunting trips with his father.  The light in his eyes, at that time, reminded her of Celegorm – of the way her cousin’s pale eyes gleamed under their feathery lashes, the wild smirk on his lips after he loosed an arrow that he knew would make its mark.  That beautiful arrogance.

The fabric has not faded, strange magic that it holds, and neither has the memory of sitting by the hearth of her husband’s halls – greater than these, in size, but with that same comforting smell of soil and tree-root.

She is singing now, as she might have done then, tidying the hobbit-hole while she waits.  She takes down the laundry they’ve hung by the fire, folds it, and winds the mass of tangled yarn on the sofa into neat spools.  Memories linger like pins prickling her fingers: the feel of Idril’s little dresses, the threading of her mother’s loom.  Those times are gone, and she is careful with nostalgia, that filthy liar.  It is dangerous to live in the past.  She puts another log on their fire.

The hobbits enter, Poppy and two of her sisters, three cousins, two second-cousins, and an aunt shooing them in the door like a herd of goats, a tired smile on her lips.  They are carrying spools of thread and homespun fabric.

Poppy’s aunt Verbena Brandybuck, seemingly never quite sure of the proper way to address her strange guest, stumbles over her words in weary gratitude.  “I cannot thank you enough, Mrs. Alder, my lady,” Verbena says, “for all of this.  For keeping them busy.  Times are getting stranger, and it’s a great help, an honor undeserved.  And good to see young hands doing good work, you understand.”

“Oh, the honor is mine!” Aredhel exclaims.  “And it’s nothing to do with embroidery, nor sewing.  Nor with hunting rabbits, for that matter, or sorting seeds.  Times are strange, you say: and that is why we must all look out for each other.”  Aredhel has realized, in these last few weeks, exactly how deeply she means this: she remembers whole centuries of helping Alder to care for the trees of the Old Forest, centuries in which she had not spoken to any but the entwives.  Overwhelmed with love and gratitude to her wife, and with grief for all that had happened, she had not thought that she missed being among people more like her own.  Now she is starting to wonder why she did not reach out to the hobbits sooner.

She still does not like to think of what might happen, if she were to contact her own people once more.

And so Verbena says one more thank-you-ever-so-much and gives her another grateful smile as she slips from the room and closes the door.  And soon Aredhel is busy reassuring Poppy’s youngest sister that everyone occasionally cross-stitches backwards and it will be no problem at all to undo and fix, and reminding the next-youngest to be careful about her sticky cake-stained fingers on the dress that she is stitching.  And they are eagerly asking her if elves always live in trees and why it is that sometimes trees _move_ , and she is so enjoying coming up with simplified and sometimes wildly inaccurate answers that they hardly notice the sun disappearing outside the window.  The clock chimes nine.

“Oh,” insists Poppy, “please do stay!  Only, my other elf promised that he would come tonight and tell us a bedtime-story again.  I am sure he would so like to meet you!”

Aredhel has hardly spoken to another elf in thousands of years.  “Another day,” she lies, and once she has assured them that she will return the following week and teach them all the different animal-tracks in the snow, she makes her exit.  There are at least fourteen different back-doors from Brandy Hall, and though she usually makes for the trap-door that leads down to a long tunnel that brings her nearly to the Hedge, today she knows that Alder is waiting for her on the bank of the Brandywine, and so she turns toward a different exit.

Something stops her.

Hardly sure of what she is doing, Aredhel doubles back toward the kitchen where she had been sitting with the hobbits, and hides herself in the darkness of the round hallway between a long line of storage-barrels and a stack of wooden boxes.  Her hearing has only sharpened after rebirth: even through the closed door, she can hear the sound of beds being unrolled and tables pushed aside and clothing being changed.  After nearly an hour in which she almost turns and leaves, there comes another set of footsteps entering from the second door on the opposite side of the room.

There are cries of “Mr. Elf, Sir!” and “A tale, a tale!”

Then, a laugh like the music of waves on the beach.  “Indeed!  I did promise.  But _you_ must promise that you will go right to sleep afterwards, and not be too much trouble to your poor aunts and uncles.”

Her breath catches in her throat.  She does not dare to move from her hiding-space.  It is exactly the most and least likely person she could ever expect to find here.  She tunes out the laughing questions of the hobbit-children and hears only the sound of Maglor’s voice, mesmerizing and familiar, like the memory of a dream.

*

_Yes.  I thought I could tell you the story of how the ents lost their wives._

_I’m getting to that.  Ents look like trees!  They are a tree-shaped people, who take care of the trees the way that you take care of your goats.  Trees have their own needs, you know.  Not quite the same as goats.  But they need clear water, and good earth, just like the rest of us._

_Now, a very long time ago, the ents were living with their wives in a beautiful place called Beleriand that is no more.  And then, one day, they lost their wives!_

_We lost them, and now we cannot find them.  That is what the ents tell.  And deep down, I think they believe their wives to be dead.  Though, they don’t phrase it that way to outsiders.  Ents are terribly elusive, you know.  It’s like speaking with a tree – all trees are like that, really – they remember everything that’s ever happened in all of Arda, but they live so deeply in the moment that they can’t be bothered with it._

_I’m getting there.  Have patience, child._

_But the entwives aren’t dead at all!  And they have another legend.  They say that once, an entwife with a form like that of an Alder-tree was dancing in a clearing, on the surface of the sphagnum moss, deep in a clearing in the great mires near a great Elvish city called Vinyamar.  With her every step, the bog beat in time like a drum.  And it came to pass that an elvish princess, straying from the path, came upon the alder-entwife dancing and cried: Yavanna, Yavanna! For she thought that she saw the Vala herself, pounding on the drum that was the pulsing heart of the land, her branches swaying without a breeze._

_No, you haven’t heard this one before.  This one is different!  The beginning is a little similar._

_And so it came to pass, that the princess would visit Alder every day.  Far they walked into the bog together, and spoke of many things.  For they had much in common!  And the alder-entwife was very beautiful, with hair like a waterfall of bright leaves.  And they fell in love, there, right in the center of the great mire, and they were married._

_No, not like that.  Elf-marriages aren’t quite like hobbit-marriages, you know.  There is not always a festival.  Sometimes they are just.  They.  Well.  They were married!  Because they loved each other.  But they kept it a secret, at first, and no one knew.  And that proved troublesome, later on._

_And the princess would go back to her city by day, but she would slip away by night, to visit her wife.  But one day, the princess found that she was going to have to go away, without a word.  And she wanted to bring her wife, of course.  But her brother was become very proud and controlling.  And he sent her on ahead to their new home, very suddenly, promising that she could come back and say farewell to Vinyamar another time.  And so she did not tell him about her wife.  But when she tried to return, the king’s soldiers forbade her.  The way is shut, they said.  That is the law now._

_And the alder-entwife was very sad, not knowing why she had been so suddenly abandoned.  And she saw the great empty city, and the mess of carefully-hidden trails, blocked and crisscrossed to make themselves impossible to follow.  Long she wandered, searching for her beloved.  And with her went the ent-wives elder and pine and beech and chestnut, because they were saddened to see their friend.  And curious, I think, too.  They were curious, because they did not know that an entwife falling in love with an elf-maid was a thing that could happen within the circles of the World._

_And so they wandered farther and farther into distant forests.  They searched and searched, and the Great Wars came between them and their husbands.  They could not find what had happened to the princess, not yet.  But they found something else, something that was just as good._

_They found that they loved each other!  They found that they no longer desired to return to the ents.  That two entwives could be just as happy a pair, as they had ever been with their ent-husbands.  And that is why the ents lost their wives._

_Yes!  Yes, she found her lover, in the end.  But the moon is halfway across the sky already.  I think that is a story for another night._

 

## The Shire, Third Age 3018, October

When Aredhel returns to her wife, she does not mention that her cousin is in the Shire, nor the startling and disconcerting implication that he might know that she still lives, or that he must somehow have spoken to an entwife when they so stubbornly keep to themselves.  It is, she thinks, the first real secret she has kept from Alder, and it sits uneasily inside her.

But a day goes by, and they are busy checking that the trees are safe in their wintery half-sleep; and then they are laughing by the bank of the Brandywine, and it is already almost dusk.  Alder has been describing some of the things she’s seen hobbit-tweens doing right next to her, in the South of the Shire between the marshes and the Hedge, thinking themselves to be alone.  Two alder-trees nearby are softly singing a Quenya hymn that Alder herself has taught them, in low, half-asleep voices that blend into the creaking wind on their icy branches and the slow hum of the river.

Aredhel is sitting on a rock with her boots hovering just inches above the icy slow-moving water, a mess of fabric and needles and thread strewn across her lap.  Fox is sleeping against her back, his body stretched long so that his spine digs into her hips, his nose resting on the rock.  Occasionally, he wiggles his tail in his sleep, making the embroidery project flutter.

_(“You cannot possibly let the fox be named Fox!” Alder had exclaimed, clearly amused, when they had first begun to teach the animal Westron._

_“It reminds me of something a friend once did,” Aredhel had said.  “And he’s hardly going to meet another Westron-speaking fox!”  When either entwives or elves taught their own words to animals, they almost always used Quenya or Sindarin.  Aredhel, already fluent in the language of foxes, had slowly been helping Fox to learn the language of the hobbits._

_“Fox,” Alder had repeated again to herself, leaves fluttering as she shook her head in feigned exasperation.  Fox had nuzzled his nose excitedly against her bark.)_

Aredhel holds the hobbit-style handkerchief up to the light: neat little blue flowers with a faint hint of those curling Finwëan stars that used to mark her own childhood clothing, the tendrils of each bloom looping back like the dizzying swirl of her father’s emblem.  She smooths it out with her hands, her eyes blazing with triumph.  “There!”

Alder is bent over the river, filling a deep bucket with the water there.  She stops what she is doing, and looks up, her grey eyes as bright as the water that pools around her feet.  “You’ve finished!”  She sets the pail of river-water aside, and comes over to where her wife is sitting.  She neither walks nor glides – her many slender trunks are her body and her legs all at once.  She is wrapped in leaves and catkins like clothing, stark and wonderously bright against the autumn trees that are beginning to fade to brown and yellow.  Alder kneels, runs a finger over the fabric.  “She will love it!” she exclaims.  “A perfect gift.”  She brushes a kiss against her wife’s cheek with lips that are as strong and smooth as tree-bark.

They sit and watch the ducks on the river, for a long while, until the thin sunlight pales from the sky.  Cows and sheep call out in the distance.  It is so peaceful that Aredhel stops wondering, for a little while, whether it is worth worrying about being found out by a cousin who probably wants to be found even less than she does, or whether she does, in fact, want to speak with him again.  And Alder is full of gossip about the goings-on of the Old Forest, and the last full moon of the harvest is rising, pale and watery in the cloudless sky.

And the October cold is not so bad, with her cloak wrapped around her, and Alder’s strong branches holding her tight and safe like wooden arms.  She is nestled inside her lover’s arms like a snailshell, her ear pressed up against that slow entish heartbeat, one hand curled around the mandrake-amulet hung at her neck.  Fox squirms inside a space between Alder’s roots.  The sun melts golden-red behind the meadow.  They fall asleep in the way that they do: her marble skin against smooth alder-bark, those strong arms holding her, firm and earthy in a way that makes her heart sing, heart to heartwood.


	3. On Literality and Metaphor, I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: relatively nongraphic HoME-canonical suicide attempt. Also, implied use of my absolute least favorite trope, for necessary plot reasons, and I honestly feel so guilty about this that I'm going to go ahead and ruin everything by promising that I Would Never Really Do That To You, Ever.

## Third Age, 3019, November

If you sit very still under the elder-bush on the last full moon of the harvest, you can see the elf-queen ride by with her court – unless, of course, it’s the bog-monster who emerges from the trees to eat your goats.  Possibly, this depends upon the day of the week, or upon whether you are asking a Brandybuck or a Bolger.

These are the kind of stories that the hobbits like to tell each other, usually with much sighing and shaking of heads.  Sometimes, the younger Tooks and Brandybucks will draw straws, and the loser has to sit out in the center of the barley-field at midnight on the last day of October, without a light, until the next sunrise.

Hobbit-lore shifts so quickly: in the hundred or so years since Maglor last visited the Shire, a whole slew of new legends have arisen.  The grave-mounds open up on the full moon of November.  Never swim in the Withywindle when the moon is full, or the Great Willow will snatch you up and you’ll never be heard from again.  About half of those stories are true.

This is all to say, that Maglor is not particularly surprised when Poppy Muggins-Brandybuck asks him, rather as though she already expects the answer to be an affirmative, whether he knows the other elves who sometimes visit Brandy Hall.  The child asks this in the same breath as she asks whether Maglor has ever seen a dragon, and whether he’s ever seen the _ocean_ , and whether elves really do wear foxglove-blooms as thimbles, so he does not take the enquiry too seriously.  “Yes, he says, “I have most certainly seen a dragon, and the sea as well!  And I should be glad to tell you all about it.  But you must promise me, that, if I do, you will get in bed, all the way in bed, and that you shan’t get up again until morning.”

Poppy’s great uncle twice-removed (unless it’s her third-cousin’s grandfather?  Hobbit-genealogies follow a complex set of rules that seem to disengage entirely from logic or linear chronology), the master of Buckland Hall, is usually glad to raid the kitchens with insomniac hobbit-children and tweens in the small hours of the morning.  He is always willing to listen to romantic woes or fear of thunderstorms – or, more recently, fear of the  stands where stands of alder-trees had once lined the other side of the Brandywine rivermess of ugly stumps.  Some of the children claim that the spirit of the alder-tree had emerged shrieking from the center of one of the trees in the form of an elf, bleeding terribly, pulling at her dark hair and keening amid reddish ruin of stacked wood waiting to be taken to the mill.

Others said that, after the wood was cut, the bog began to demand sacrifice.  A dark form, at once like a spider and like a woman, lurked there, lurking unsuspecting travelers into its clutches, to be devoured.  She wandered the boggier regions of the Overbourn Marshes, waiting for prey.

Hobbit superstitions grow quickly.  But still, in the time since the trees had first been cut, three sheep have gone missing from Buckland, and twice as many chickens.

At any rate, the Master of the Hall has had greater matters to attend to than nervous young hobbits – and he had asked, only if Maglor did not mind, if it would be possible for him to keep some of the younger children busy for the time being?

It was phrased very politely: no one specifically mentioned the increasing numbers of Big Folk causing trouble in a few of the local inns, or about the shortages of dried grains that seemed to have intensified unexpectedly in the past month, or the early winter that had already struck with gusts of snow before there was time to finish digging the parsnips.

Maglor, whose dreams of the seashore have begun to feel like a sentient force dragging him away from this little landlocked country, and whose feelings of guilt at being forever offered comfortable beds only intensify as the weeks wear on, feels he cannot possibly refuse such a request.

On this particular night, there are five hobbits, crowded onto two large beds near the hearth-fire in the lower kitchen, all of whom promise diligently to sleep, “if you, Mr. Elf, Sir, would be so kind as to tell us one of your tales – but no more _doom_ , I want to hear about the _sea_.  Is it true the river really goes there?”

“I can tell you a story that I heard from your grandfather.”  Maglor had himself told another version to their grandfather’s grandfather.  “And I’ll tell it in the way that he did, or try to, if you find my songs so disheartening!”

_*_

_Now, you all know about rain, right?  That water goes like steam, up up up, and makes clouds in the sky, and then it rains down again, and it collects in the rivers, and they flow to the sea._

_Yes, but the elves talk about it differently.  You can think of it as a love story, if you like, or a story about a family doing their different parts.  Because we say that there is a God who is the Lord of all Waters, and he has two students: and one of those is a god who makes the ocean stormy and angry, and another is his wife who calms him down again.  And she is the goddess of the bays, and the surfaces of all the rivers, and she loves the seaweeds and the fishes who live in the shallows.  So she is who you are seeing, when you are catching frogs and snails by the side of the Brandywine._

_Yes, quite literally!  But this story I’m going to tell you is kind of a secret; it’s something that only the hobbits know about, really._

_You’ll see.  Ages ago, when the world was younger, the mournful voice of the Sea was crying out through the cliffs, mourning, and singing sad songs.  For the spirit who sings in the cliffs of the seashore had done terrible things, you know – destroyed whole cities – and so the Sea Herself did not like him very much._

_But now and again, he would hear her voice, a voice that was the still waters of the bay and the waves at the surface of the river, joining in with his song.  It is said that the hair of the Lady of the Seas spreads all the way across all the waters of the world.  And so he was rather taken with her, I suppose.  That is a difference between hobbits and elves: elves think of hair as being particularly attractive, you could say.  The longer, the better.  Similar to how hobbits feel about…  Well.  Her hair was just especially beautiful to him!_

_And one day they were singing together, and their music was so beautiful that they made a daughter together._

_Of course it doesn’t make sense, but that is how the story was taught to me.  That is what you wanted, right?_

_They had a daughter whose hair was as gold as the holy-crocus, and she loved most of all the banks of the river, and she would gather the lilies there.  And she would dig in the sand, and sing the songs her father had taught her.  But they hid her true identity, and she was never named among gods, nor elves: for her mother’s husband was a wrathful and jealous god, and her mother’s lover came never again among elves._

_And one day the River-daughter was digging in the mud and sand in that place where Anduin flows into the sea, and she found there a Little People, with skin as brown as river-clay, making their homes in the sandy banks under the roots of trees._

_But she knew that the World was a dangerous place!  And so she led them, little by little, from river to river, northwards, northwards, until she found a place that they could be safe._

_And one day, gathering water-lilies from the surface of the Withywindle, she saw hair that was not her mother’s!  So she grabbed hold of it, and pulled, and found that it was actually a beard.  And that is how the River-daughter came to pull a man from the water, sopping wet and spluttering._

_And he said: this was His land, but he liked the Little Folk as much as she.  And so they were married, and the Hobbits spread their dwellings across the green fields and woods beside his lands.  But if you venture into the Old Forest and are very quiet, sometimes you’ll see the Daughter of the River, gathering lilies in the moonlight._

_*_

Poppy does not entirely keep her promise.  She crawls away from her sleeping siblings to where Maglor has fallen asleep, his open eyes still gazing unseeingly into the dying embers of the fire.  He blinks a few times, coming back into himself.  The young hobbit, wrapped in a blanket, has sat down in his lap, with that same blind and undeserving trust that he remembers from a young Elrond in the midst of a thunderstorm.

“Mr. Elf, Sir?  What about the other elves who come to tell us stories?  The ones who clean your dishes and fold your laundry?  Are they like you, too?”

“Tell me about the elf who folds your laundry,” Maglor says.  He has raised quite a few children by now, and hardly thinks it worthwhile to suggest that her imaginary elf-friend might not be real, or might in actuality be one of her relations.

Poppy looks uncertain.  “I promised her that I wouldn’t tell.”  She leans against his shoulder and he absentmindedly combs at her tousled hair with his gloved fingers.  Even after so many centuries, the blind trust that the younger hobbits offer him, is astounding.

“Ah, but we elves can be terribly shy, you know.   I imagine she was only trying to be polite.”  He does not imagine anything of the sort.  But this reassurance seems to work on the girl, who relaxes visibly.

“She is very tall, like you!  And her hair was very dark, like yours, and she liked to help me with my stitching, and Melilot and Celandine too.  And she showed me how to do a flower I had never seen before!  She said it warmed her heart to see Little Folk who still loved the art of their hands.  She said it just like that – I suppose that is how they talk, how elves talk, I mean, sir.  _It warms my heart_ and _loved the art of their hands_ and such.”   Poppy seems to have forgotten all thought of secrecy, pleased to have an audience.  “And then she was gone!  She doesn’t tell us stories anymore.”

 “Did she tell you her name?”

“Alder, Sir.  She called herself Alder, like the tree that bleeds and cries if you cut it.  And I wanted to ask her how she got into that tree, though it seemed terribly rude to be asking!  But she had a good feeling to her, a friendly feeling, if you know what I mean.  And one day last week I saw her sneaking off toward the Hedge.  I started to talk to her but she put a finger to her lips and shook her head.  And she climbed right over.”

Sometime later, Poppy shows him the flowers along the edge of the curtain she had been embroidering: round, feathery blue flowers, a simplified version of the great banners of Idril’s crest, and later Elwing’s, emblems that he had seen stained with red blood at Sirion.

 

## First Age, 588

Here is a secret that will not make it into the tales: Maglor _does_ jump into the sea.

He tosses the jewel back and forth between his hands as though he expects it to cool like a stone pulled from the fire – as though he somehow cannot grasp that _he_ is what is making it burn.

Around them, the world is still splitting open into gaping wounds filled with fire and river.  The shore itself is irregular here, smooth in places and then suddenly rough, as though the ocean itself does not quite know where it ends; as though the water itself is grieving the whole cities that have been pulled under forever.

The more the jewel burns him, the more tightly Maedhros seems to grasp it.  Maglor is more afraid of the empty, utterly unsurprised look in his brother’s eyes, than of the smoke or the smell of burning flesh.

Once, hunting with Celegorm in the woods north of Mithrim, he had wounded one of the great Northern wolves, the ones who lived outside of Sauron’s dominion, but it had escaped.  They’d tracked its bloody footprints for almost a week, and cornered it finally against the stone of a steep waterfall, three broken arrows protruding from its fur.  There had been a terrible look in the animal’s eyes, then, the desperate pleading for _this to be over_ mingled horribly with an animalistic, raging desire to fight back.  He thinks he sees that look again, now.

Maglor hears his own voice shouting his brother’s name.

The sudden realization that he is truly and absolutely alone – and he has never been alone, there has always been a brother, or several, to report to or to confide in or to protect – snaps the wind from his lungs.  Unless the snapping is the sharp cold of the ocean as he flings himself from the cliff, or his collarbone as he collides with the sharp rocks that jut from the shoreline.

It is not a decision; he does not stop to think.  If Maedhros jumps, he jumps.  This is how it had always been.

He tries to remember to inhale the water, which only seems determined to spit him back up again.  White lights explode across his vision from a pressure-point somewhere deep in his skull, as the Silmaril is wrenched from his hands.  He prays to Ulmo: _if you have ever hated me…_

He washes ashore after a few moments or years, burnt hands stinging with salt, vomiting ocean-water until he finally he lies still, coughing into the sand.

* 

His bare feet ache.  He has been walking forever.  He rarely stops for water, never for food.  The salty air is raw against his skin.  Whole sand-dunes have crumbled behind his back.  He is not running from the waves, nor have they tried to swallow him yet.  He follows the coastline, south and east, on and on.

Sometimes, the ground rumbles and shakes, as licks of flame split to reveal another gaping chasm of fire, and he thinks of his brother and falls to his knees and sings until he weeps, and weeps until he vomits.  Finally, lying beneath a great holly-tree with his whole body curled around his burnt hands, harp hanging uselessly at his pack, his lips parched, he sees the water coming, really coming now – a wave risen up to take him.  _Thank Eru_ , he thinks.  And he forces out another hymn: a song of praise to Ulmo that he had learned as a child.  Sand and dirt mingle on his lips with the distant ash in the air.  He changes the line _about keep me safe from the rage of the sea_ , and sings: _let the rage of the sea take me._

But Ulmo’s trumpets are not on the air.  A voice has taken up Maglor’s song: a clear, deep voice, like the ripples on a still bay, like the rush of brackish water where a river meets the sea.  He can hear it all around him, as though the song flows inside his body without the use of his ears.  But he cannot see her at first, until slowly she rises up from the shore, neither walking nor swimming.  Her feet make no imprint in the sand, and though her form is that of an elf, she seems almost translucent, such do the colors of her complexion match the sand and sea-foam behind her.  He tries to stand, and manages to kneel.

She is still singing.  She crouches down beside him.  “The rage of the sea has no intention of bearing you to Mandos,” she says, with cold scorn in her voice but pity on her face.  She wears a crown of braided seaweed, and long strands of it trail through her hair.

“Lady Uinen.”  He means to say _forgive me_ or _please bring me to Manwë_ or _end this_ but realizes all at once: “It was you, who pulled me from the sea.”  He pauses.  “You were more eager to kill me, once.  And I had done much less wrong, then.”

“I found many _fëar_ , after your first massacre,” she replies, not quite answering his unspoken question.  “Wandering aimless and sorrowful through the deep places of the sea.  That was my task, you see: most of the Teleri you had killed were sorrowful, and fled at once to Mandos, weeping without eyes; but the Noldor, caught between shame at their deeds, or else horror at having been killed by their own, or terror at how the Valar might respond to their rebellion?  Some scurried into Mandos; and some were so shocked and frightened that they wandered through the sea, vulnerable and alone.”

“And some you pulled there, when you sunk their boats.”  There is no reproach in his tone.  She should have sunk all of the boats.

“I did not mean to say I pitied them!  Only that it was laid to me, to find those who had fled the Summons, and try to guide them back, before they should stray too close to the Enemy.  But your wife told me: _I will not go back.  Not as long as marriage is binding until the end of Arda.  I will not be wed to a kinslayer._ ”

Maglor does not answer for a moment.  “I understand, then.  This is your judgement.  You would pull me from drowning, and tell me what hurts me most.  That is just.”  He tries to laugh bitterly, and coughs instead.

“It is not my place to judge you, kinslayer!  I am not the Lord of Death.  But I could not bring her back to Him, either.  I could not tell her otherwise.  I could not undo the pain of that, your first crime.  Her fëa wandered far from my oceans, many years ago.  I could not tell you what became of her.  And I could not let your body float lifeless in the sea while your fëa sought peace in Mandos!  Not when the one you should have loved is lost in endless sorrow at your deeds.  Hardly even the worst of your deeds!”

“Am I permitted to fall on my own knife, then?”

“Knives are not mine to command.”  There is an odd smile behind her lips; she might be laughing at him.  “But I hope you will not.  Your songs are a gift that Middle-Earth is not ready to lose.”

And she bears him, despite his protests, to the shores of Middle-Earth on the back of a whale, and leaves him there: standing on a high cliff by the sea-shore, his clothing drenched and tattered, harp still slung uselessly at his back, while in front of him a vast ocean spreads across the continent that was once his home.

And so he sings, because singing is the only thing between him and the grief that lies beneath that deep, expressionless water.  He sings a song that he once wrote in her praise, the lady who calms the rage of her husband’s storms.  And now and then hears a voice picking up the call, echoing his mournful songs, occasionally writing a new line or two, her voice as smooth as sea-glass.

He remembers, again, that she was once an Ainu who sang in the Beginning before Arda was made, and that thought only makes more shame fill his bones – makes his songs as salty as ocean-water.  He sings the verses of the Noldolantë which tell of the kinslaying at Alqualondë; and can hear her own voice, echoing the chorus back at him.

 

## First Age 538

“We found this one in a cave.  That one in the waterfall.”  Maedhros turns to the two shivering children.  “What are your names?  Speak quickly.”  He is doing a good job of pretending to be commanding, but Maglor can see the way his gaze keep flitting back to the place where Elwing had jumped, a deep longing in his eyes: it seems to Maglor to be as much of a longing for the act of jumping, than for the jewel she had taken with her.

Elrond responds with a frightened, defiant glare, too sharp for a six-year-old, biting his lip and shaking his head.  A bruise around one of his eyes is darkening to purple.   His twin, hair still wet from the spray of the waterfall where he had been hiding, has buried his head in Elrond’s shoulder.

“You will answer my brother,” Maglor says, in that quiet, almost-musical way that his followers have always found so difficult to disobey.  A command is like a song: it is strongest if it vibrates at just the right frequency.

“I am the elf of the cave,” Elrond said, sticking out his chin.  “And he is the elf of the waterfall.”  He is at once proud as a Noldo, and also soft and stocky like a secondborn child, neither quite the equivalent of an elf or mortal of his age.

Maedhros makes a sudden movement, but then shrugs and shakes his head.  “Have it your way, _Elrond_.”

*

The peredhil do not seem to develop Elvish hearing as quickly as the children of the Eldar might, and it is not so difficult for Maglor to eavesdrop while giving them the illusion of privacy.  He tells himself that this is for their own safety; they like to pretend that they are mature enough to wander away from the camp on their own.

 “Elros – ”  Elrond is sitting against a tree on the edge of the forest, a book in his hand, two more on the ground beside him.

“I hate when you call me that,” Elros scowls.  “It sounds like _his_ name.” It is three years since Sirion was sacked and burned, a strange period in which their bodies cannot quiet decide whether to be young and musical as an elfling or gangly and moody as one of the secondborn.

“Give them your birth name, then,” said Elrond.  Tell them you are Elurin.  Tell them they’ve saved Elured and Elurin.  They will be so pleased.”

Elros kicks at the tree with his foot.

Elrond smiles, unperturbed by his brother’s mood.  “Is it such a bad name?  Like the spindrift, scattered by the waves of father’s ship.  Is that so awful?”

“It is when _they_ say it.  They’ve taken everything.  Our mother.  Our home.  Our own names.  And the way they pronounce them!  In their stupid language with their stupid accents.  _Elerothe._ ”  He sneers.

“The old _Beorian_ for _ros_ was _roth,_ ” Elrond tells him.  “I read it in a book.  I bet Beren himself would have pronounced it just like that.”

This makes Elros pause.  But then he scowls deeper.  “And you.”  Elros kicks the water more forcibly now.  “Elf of the cave.  Like a dwarf.  Like a miner.  Like a _fucking_ Noldo.”

 “We _are_ Noldor, from our grandmother,” Elrond reminds him, though from his tone, he knows as well as his brother that _family murdering family_ does not really bring any comfort.  “The great Hall of Throne in Doriath was called _Menelrond_ , do you know that?  Because Melian herself made that hall to look like the stars that Varda herself had made.”  They do not speak for a moment.  Elrond almost seems to have gone back to his book.  Then: “Do you even know what that word means?  Fucking?”

Elros chews at the end of one of his long braids.   “Maedhros uses it when he is angry.”

“But mother never did,” Elrond says.

This time, when he kicks the tree again, Elros intentionally lets his foot graze his brother’s leg, a distinctly un-elvish behavior.  Elrond swipes at him with his book in retaliation, which he dodges.

“I don’t want to be “remembrance of Elu,” says Elrond finally.  “I can’t remember him.  I never knew him.  I can’t even remember father.”  In the moment, he seems to Maglor very much like an _Elrond_ : like something in the star-dome above Elu Thingol’s throne, at once a shining part of Menegroth and an echo of something faraway.  “Besides,” Elrond adds, “I read in a book – ”

“You and your _books_!”

“ – that some of the Secondborn have rituals where they sit in a cave or under a waterfall for a long time.  And then they are reborn and they go on to write great poems and songs.  So maybe, this is who we were supposed to be.  Maybe someday we’ll meet some of them, and they can explain.”

“ _Books_ ,” Elros says again, in the same tone that he had used to say _fuck_.  But that night, he is already asking his foster-parents whether they’ve known any human poets who were reborn in caves under waterfalls.  And Maglor is only too glad to pretend not to have overheard the conversation that sparked this interest.

 

For all their resentment, the children want to _learn_ ; they are _excited_ to be _alive_ and _learning about the world_ in a way that Maglor had forgotten was even possible.  They memorize the old songs eagerly; they ask complex theoretical questions about musical spellcraft and poetic theory and botany.  And so he teaches them anything that they want to know: which mushrooms grow on which types of trees, the differences in Quenya and Sindarin modes of the tengwar, and how to weave an amulet from bloodwort to keep nightmares away.

He tries to teach them the definition of _metaphor_ , but it isn’t a word that makes sense in the face of apocalypse, on the edge of the world, after the fall of everything that Maglor once thought he believed in.  _What is_ metaphor _when your father has become a literal star in the sky, and my father was consumed by his own burning spirit and fell into dust?_

*

_It is universally accepted that all the children of Eru make meaning through stories.  A thousand metaphors converge like carrion-crows in the chest and then fly off into the night: one for sorrow, two for mirth.  There was once a tree that brought forth a golden fruit, and that fruit became the sun.  And if you don’t believe that, well, the tree is dead now, and the sea rages and spits and will not let us return.  So you are going to have to take my word for it._

_I’m sorry, Elrond, I lost myself for a moment.  But no, that Song was not a metaphor.  There were two Trees, and they glowed quite literally with sunlight and moonlight.  And when they were killed, Nienna wept.  She keened in lilting tones of moonlit tears.  The trees stayed dead._

_They stayed dead because they stayed dead.  Some things don’t come back from the dead.  Like the Two Trees.  Or any trees.  Or the younger children of Ilúvatar._

_Or Fëanorians.  Yes.  Thank you, for bringing that up.  But if you don’t mind, we should move on with your botany lesson.  What can you tell me about this one here?_

_Yes.  Bloodwort.  And it will make a good wound-salve if you steep it in oil until the oil turns red.  It blooms at midsummer, you see: it takes the height of all that light from the sun, and holds it inside.  That’s why it drives away the darkness of thunderstorms.  And the darkness in our_ fëar _when we go too long without seeing the sun._

 _Melancholia isn’t_ sadness _, though; it’s a pattern of symptoms in your whole body.   Dark bodily fluids, toxic waste products stagnating in the body, weakness.  The liver cannot clear all that darkness out of the_ hröa _.  Vital organs give up and begin to shut down.  Necrotic tissues that cannot heal themselves.  Elves call that_ fading _and the Secondborn are more likely to get it when they’ve had too many of their mortal illnesses for too long._

 _The word translates differently in Quenya because we did not need anything called_ bloodwort _in Valinor.  We did not bother much with wound-salves, then._ (A terrible pause.)

_But sometimes we call it the armpit-plant of Oromë.  You see, a long time ago, before the Great Journey, a lone elf wandered too far on a hunting-trip, and he was lost in the wilds for many a year; and he wandered too far altogether, into the shadows on the edge of the enemy’s land, though he was not captured.  And when he returned, the melancholy had taken him, and badly; but the Vala that they then called the Hunter, put a sprig of crushed bloodwort to his armpit, and he was healed.  You have quite a lot of nerve-endings there, you know, mortal or elf, in that place around your armpit, and so the plant can absorb more easily through your skin.  And many elves will still keep sprig of bloodwort tucked inside their clothing, to the left of the heart, right near the armpit, as an amulet._

_Yes, there are a group of Secondborn who call it the Thunder-Plant.  And we learned that name in Valinor, too, even though we did not have those sorts of thunderstorms then: the kind that could flood your camp and ruin your crops.  It was theoretical lore, taught to us by the Valar themselves.  We knew that if we wanted the Gods to bless us with a storm, or to still the pounding rain, that this was a plant we could use. The Valar themselves taught us this, and the name helped us remember: especially before we had the tengwar to record that sort of thing._

_That is what_ literal _means:_ happening exactly as written in the old books. _You must understand: before written language, that is_ all there was.

 _No.  I’m not quite_ that _old.  Although I was somewhat of an experiment in childhood language development, I think.  My father would take these careful notes on how long it took us to learn to write, which letters we found most difficult –_

_But in any case.  There was a year when the rains were so thick that half the crops in Beleriand were nearly destroyed, and it was Finderáto who had a dream, and Ulmo said to him: have you forgotten about bloodwort?  And so he passed on the message to the humans, and everywhere, the farmers began to put the yellow flowers of bloodwort on their windowsills, and the rains were calmed._

_You can think of all of Arda as one huge_ hröa _, if it helps.  So, bloodwort is a signal to the Valar, that says: if it pleases you, stop this lightning!  Or, you can use it to stop pains in the body that_ feel _like lightning-strikes.  You can use it to banish thunderclouds either inside the body, or outside, you see?  Rainstorms, floods, or swampy damp-cold conditions in the urinary system._ That _is why we need poetry in medicine._

 _And that is what_ metaphor _means, Elrond: your body isn’t_ literally _a tiny Arda full of lightning and rain.  But if you think about it this way, you’ll know which plants to use._

 

 

## Third Age 3019, December 

Maglor prefers the _Golden Perch_ because that is where the singing is the loudest: there, on the eastern edge where the Shire meets the Wilderness, the hobbits sing like they know, deep in their bones, that there is a whole World outside their borders.  He lets them think they’ve gotten him drunk – though, that is a relief that he does not allow himself anymore – and then he joins in.  He sings the _Ñoldolante_ and he sings their drinking-song about the hobbit who jumped into the sky during his birthday-party and landed on the moon.  And sometimes he writes his own little hobbit-songs, simple and catchy: about the spider who drank the light from the sun, or about the great fire-drake who had overtaken the Pass of Aglon in the Dagor Brogolach, as flames poured in rivulets from Angband and laid Ard-Galen to dust.  He ends this song with Maedhros’s army rescuing him, forcing back the enemy, bringing him safely to Himring.  He does that whenever he can: portrays his brothers as the strong ones, the bright beacons of hope, the heroes.

Sometimes, he changes the story.  In fact, the earth itself is an army of fire-breathing dragons, spitting their burning fury across the green fields.  But the flowers return like an army of elves, and the fields are green again.  The fields are green again: that is the power of song.

The hobbits think him peculiar, the lone traveler with a voice of gold, his long, dark braids peeking out from his tattered cloak, his feet as bare as their own but decidedly less hairy.  But they crave his songs the way they crave their ale, and curiosity often overrides suspicion.

The hobbits do not care for strangers, but Maglor knows the right melodies to calm the unease in their hearts, to keep nosy questions at bay, the subtle vibrations of _I am not an enemy._ Into his lyrics he slips his little Quenya en-chant-ments, too quick to catch: _I mean you no harm_.  He can sing himself a disguise, the hooded bard who might be an elf, or maybe a man, or something else entirely, because most of these hobbits would not know an elf if they saw one.  And sometimes they sing him their own elves, their gloriously foolish Quenyish-named elves on westbound ships.

Later, he sits out on the town green in the starlight, smoking pipe-weed with younger hobbits, who grow drowsier and more foolish as the moon rises over head.

Nienna was the Vala whom Olórin had followed, and Nienna’s spirit pervaded the Shire in a way that would have surprised those who had grown up with the statues built in Her honor in the corners of Noldorin gardens, her stone eyes weeping, one hand raised aloft with its vase full of tears.   _She rises above you, her stone shroud vast as Oiolossë, until you are very small, and yet you are not afraid – you are not afraid! Because there is nothing she will not forgive, and there is no one for whom she will not weep._

Here, the Lady of Pity forgave the hobbits their lack of heed for the woes of those outside their borders, their petty concern over their neighbors’ sheep or a deficiency of pipe-weed while the rest of Arda was at war.  She wept for every simple concern and blessed all their little joys with her tears, and their fields with rain.  Olórin never acknowledged this aloud, but it was visible, to elvish eyes at least: a sort of translucent glow that made the trees greener and the sky bluer and the hobbits’ laughter even brighter.

“A song, a song!” The first hobbit shouts, more loudly than he likely intends, for the third time that night, jolting Maglor from his thoughts.  “I want a love-song.  Something cheerful for once.”

And so he sings a song he had written for Uinen, there on the beach, watching the retreating back of Her whale sliding into the surface of the bay.  _Nienna’s tears collect on the surface of your seas_ , the song says, and there is meant to be a harp-solo in the middle, mimicking the music of the gentle winds on calm water.  Maglor does not take out his harp; he can play more now, than he could when his hands were first burned, but taking off his gloves in front of the hobbits would lead to too many questions.

“Well.  That weren’t what I meant by _cheerful_.”

“…but how does a singing-voice make a child with the river?  The river has a daughter!  Children’s stories and nonsense,” the second hobbit, a visitor from Hobbiton, scoffs.  “Rivers!” he scowls.  “Dangerous things, they are.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” the first hobbit says slowly, smoking thoughtfully.  “I heard it from my grandmother, and she lived on the border of the Forest… she Knew Things.”

“Seashores mating with rivers,” the other hobbit scoffs.  “What next?  Have you taken a fancy to that oak tree you’ve seen crossing the moor?”

“Crossing the moor?” Maglor is intrigued.

“An oak tree that _moves_!  In broad daylight, bold as anything!”  He is more than half-asleep, and slurring his words slightly.  “A pretty oak, too.  She looked, well, _woman_ -like, if you follow me.”

“I’m quite sure I don’t,” says the second hobbit.

“Like in the Old Songs,” the first says, and he clears his throat as though he means.  But his eyelids are drooping with pipe-weed and ale, and his friend only laughs, grabs the pipe out of his hands.  The hobbits fall asleep like that, full of songs, under the stars – and tomorrow they will be scandalized to hear that their tall friend had kindly picked them up and carried them, one three-foot-two hobbit under each arm, back to the steps of the _Golden Perch_.

*

 _You were not there,_ Maglor’s brothers would tease him incredulously, when he could write a flawlessly precise song for a battle on the other side of Beleriand, simply from a few rumors passed by scouts, or a brief letter.  But he could See the music of the world, could Hear it with his whole body: he listened to the smell of rotting corpse and fresh-mined iron, and he saw the music of Eru painted across the air in front of him like glowing flowers.  He can See the Third Theme drawing to its crescendo now, can hear it in the birdsong, feel its rhythm pulsing gently through his toes.

He’d watched his life play out in a heart-wrenching ballad that made shame choke his throat like bile.  But Maglor had _known_ that he was living the Noldolantë even before he had begun to write it.  Once he got into the rhythm of the thing, it was difficult to pull away.  Themes had to recur, even if you didn’t want them to; the bitterness brought the contrast to the sweet.  Maglor knew how to structure a piece of music. 

 

_(He tried saying this to a couple of his younger siblings, once, as a child._

_“Are you a fucking ainu now?”   Caranthir had asked.  He had only recently learned the word_ fucking _and was putting it into everything in a way that made him sound crosser than he really was._

_“Father says that’s why you’ll never be a warrior,” ten-year-old Curufin had put in helpfully._

_Maglor had never mentioned it again.)_

When he listens, he knows how to sing.  Overhearing two hawthorn-trees singing a love-song with the rustling of their leaves and the hum of sap moving through their branches, he’d found his brain already setting the song into Quenya.  He had not thought much of it, at the time.  It did not seem to matter, if that legend passed on the wind had ever been a basis in literal truth.  The entwives were lost thousands of years ago; but the trees want to believe that they are alive.

Sometimes, the wind comes up from the southeast, and he catches bits of songs of the distant Wars: cities of Gondor, ravaged, and the dark forms of wraiths, blocking out the sun.

*

“An elf!” one of the younger Brandybuck boys tells him, “there is an elf in the alder-tree.”

“An elf?”  Maglor’s laugh is too serious, like a sigh of ocean-wind.  He tries to rearrange his face.  “In _every_ alder tree, you say?  A different elf?  Or does the same elf live in all of them?”

“That is why it bleeds when you strike it with an axe.  You must never, never cut down an alder tree,” he says.  “Mother told that to the men who followed the Chief.  But they did it anyway.”

This is becoming a common concern among the hobbits, so naturally Maglor has been taking it as an educational opportunity.  “Do you remember what I was teaching you, about the ways the trees take care of each other?  You can think of the alder-tree as a sort of mother to the rest of the bogs and the wetlands.  The trees make alliances with the little creatures who live in their roots, and that helps them gather enough nutrients to take care of everyone else.  But they store all this food in a red substance inside of them.  It looks a lot like blood.”

“No,” the hobbit-child tells him earnestly.  “there _is_ an elf!  In one tree, at least.  I saw it myself, not two weeks ago!  Some hobbits from across the river started to cut some of the alders on the edge of the Overbourn Marshes – the ones we don’t touch, because they’re haunted.  They cut down an alder-tree, and it bled everywhere.  An elf-princess ran out of it, she ran away into the night.  But we know she is still here, because she steals the milk from our goats, and our wine, too.  But sometimes, when she is feeling kind, she will clean our kitchen, too.”

“Well.”  Maglor picks up the child and swings him in the air.  The boy giggles wildly, flails playfully, clings to his shoulder.  “It sounds like you have many tales to tell.  Maybe you will have to tell _me_ a bedtime story, instead.”

The boy shakes his head, buries his head in Maglor’s shoulder.  “No, no.  You tell all the best stories.”

*

_Once, when the world was much younger, there was a great smith who forged jewels that burned with the light of… well, with the light of the sun and moon, more or less.  But there wasn’t a sun and moon, then.  There were Trees, trees of light that lit the world with a brightness greater than the sun and moon –_

_No, they weren’t birch.  Or yew._

_No, they weren’t elm, either.  They weren’t trees, they were The Trees._

_I never said it was a good story.  But it’s a true story.  It’s what happened.  Once there was a great smith who forged jewels that –_

_Yes, they were literal jewels.  Not literal trees.  He was, however, literally a smith.  There were two smiths, actually.  And the first had red hair, and a beautiful, strong daughter, who –_

_If you keep interrupting me, it isn’t much of a story._

_No, the daughter wasn’t the smith.  She married the next smith, and he was the greatest of the elves –_

_Well, yes.  Maybe she should have been the smith, but I didn’t write this story._

_Of course I respect – of course I loved her, she was my –_

_Alright.  There was a great elven-smith, and she had the reddest hair, and the fiercest eyes.  And she was an artist, and she loved to create.  And she was the passion that drove her husband to the forge.  She was the fire that lit in his eyes.  She was his light, his flame._

_Better?  Alright?_

_And they lived in the land of the gods, under the light of the Trees, where her husband, the heir to the high kingship, forged great literal jewels with the light of the sun – because she was there beside him, guiding him.  And together they had seven sons –_

_I know, it’s a terrible cliché, but that’s how many they had!  She created seven warriors… alright, she forged seven warriors in her magical forge, because she knew that the Great War was coming.  And because she had the gift of prophecy, she gave to them names that would tell of their great strengths.  The first was Maitimo, which means “well-formed” –_

_Alright, well-forged, if you will.  Because he was of a line of mighty smiths who forged him well, and because he was the strongest elf that I have ever –_

_The strongest of the elves.  As though he was forged from steel.  And she put the strongest of her fire into him, so that his hair was the color of flames, and his spirit burned as a white flame.  And he became a fierce warrior.  The second son she named Makalaurë, that is “forging gold,” because she made him to be the carrier of the Great Stories, with a harp of gold, a voice of gold –_

_Well, obviously not_ that _great, if you won’t even let me finish your bedtime story._

*

The moon has risen high outside the window, by the time they get as far as Ungoliant devouring the trees.  “She swelled huge and hideous!  With every gold and silver piece – the horses, too, and passing birds – now she was great and terrible, huge as a stormcloud, her many eyes fierce –”

“Didn’t that hurt?  To be so full of things.  She must have felt very ill.”

“Yes,” Maglor agrees, smiling in amusement and affection, absentmindedly adjusting the quilt of the hobbit-child’s bed.  “Alas, she must have!  For she raged and stormed through the mountains, terrible to behold!  The Elves have a saying, in your language it might translate to: _evil is not in the darkness, but the stealing of the light_.  They started saying that because of the big spider, though it’s true in other ways.”

“I think she must have hurt a lot,” says the boy.  “At my birthday-party last year I ate too many cakes, and it hurt a lot.  Jewels must be very sharp.”

 _Nienna is in this place, indeed,_ Maglor thinks, _if hobbit-children are finding pity in their hearts for Ungoliant Herself._

## First age, 546

Sometimes the earthquakes split new craters of water or fire.  They are forever moving camp when the last location has proved too dangerous.  There is little news of the distant war.  But the earth is rumbling with the knowledge of its own end, and the ents are murmuring that it is time to move on.

A new river forms overnight, just alongside the camp.  Elrond, who seems to age at a rate that is neither mortal nor elf but exists outside of Time entirely, is fascinated by this new phenomenon.  He sits by the side of the river, legs dangling over the steep drop to the churning water, and speaks to it, almost conversationally.  He speaks of his own life, and his own fears and mixed feelings about his foster-parents and the distant War.  He speaks to the river every day, until it answers.

“I don’t know,” he tells Maglor, “I don’t know how to explain how it answers.  But it _does_.”  He is defensive and does not seem to expect to be believed.  Maglor, who has always heard a voice in all things, nods and does not question this.

And after Elrond and the river become acquainted, the river is willing to do as he asks: that much is clear.  Once, in a drought in the heat of summer, at a simple word from the boy, the river rises up and floods the surrounding land, carefully and briefly, and the wildflowers spring up turgid and green again.

Elrond could drown them all, Maglor thinks: but he _doesn’t._

Elros does not speak with rivers; but he goes swimming.  They warn him to _be careful_ , which only makes him swim farther.  And one day, Ulmo meets him in the place where the new river touches the sea.

They can see it from afar: the whirling ocean waves that stop harmlessly only inches from Elros, treading water and listening intently to something on the wind.  And so they know that the Lord of Waters is keeping the peredhil safe; and Maglor is contented to find that, as little as might be thought, Elros does not use his newfound hobby and ally to escape, but will swim diligently home after a day-long expedition, excited to tell his family of the new species of fish he’s seen, or carrying thick bundles of edible seaweeds tied to his back.

The children are a rope.  On the one end are the Valar and all their blessings.  On the other, Maglor and Maedhros feel the faint ripples of motion as the twins come to know the Valar, even as they are no longer able to reach for the Valar themselves.

 _“That’s what_ metaphorical _means, Elrond.  You are an elf, in front of me.  But you are also my link to the Gods.  You aren’t literally tying me to them.  But maybe you are keeping me from straying somewhere that I will regret.”_


	4. The Stars Beneath the Earth

## Time of the Trees, 1489

 

“Bring me that sword from under the table behind you.”  Aulë’s voice has raised mountains, and his words strike as imposing and irrevocable as his famed hammer that made the dwarves.  Fëanor’s workshop is impeccably, if illogically organized: neat shelves of scrolls stamped with Finwë’s royal seal are filed in the midst of charts with elaborate calculations of various properties of treelight, and the pile of rejected prototypes for stone-carving tools piled haphazardly over the sheathed sword in the corner, is the only disorganized area of the room.  Laurelin’s light streams in through skylights overhead, carrying waves of faint harp-music from somewhere in the distance.

Maedhros does not dare meet the Vala’s eyes as he crouches down to detangle the weapon from its hiding-place, but his gaze jumps back toward the closed door, heart fluttering in his throat.  Fëanor will return at any moment, and his sons have been firmly instructed not to reveal the existence of their weaponry.  Even holding the sheathed blade like this, in both hands, presenting it horizontally to the God before him, its very presence in his grasp makes him tingle with exhilaration.  Fëanor had intended it for his eldest son, and had only just shown him the finished product for the first time as they had heard Aulë approaching.  The sudden lack of its weight as Aulë takes it from his hands feels wrong, the sudden lack of a part of him that should not be parted with – like giving the Vala his clothing, or a limb, or his own beating heart.

Aulë unsheathes the sword: one of Fëanor’s most recent designs, with a hand-and-a-half grip, a bright Fëanorian star laid in gold into the pommel, the hilt wrapped in reddish leather.  “Your father has been teaching you to wield it?”  Aulë is one of the few people tall enough that Maedhros has to turn his face upward to meet his eyes.  Maedhros is acutely aware that he is in the presence of a God who has arm-wrestled Tulkas, and won.

“No, my lord, of course not.”  It shines with the gold in his earrings like firelight.  His braids are twined with copper ribbons like the gold that his cousin uses, blending into his fiery hair, catching brightly in the mingled tree-light and firelight, giving the impression that all his hair is itself molten copper.

 “It is an offence to lie to a God, you know.”  Balanced in the Vala’s hands, the sword that Maedhros had been so proud to be strong enough to wield, looks hardly larger than a hunting-knife.  Aulë holds it appraisingly up in the light from the window.

“Yes, my lord.”  As he watches, Aulë examine the sword, Maedhros is slowly rolling his shoulders to stretch his arms out covertly behind his back.  Maedhros never quite stops moving.  It’s not fidgeting, precisely, but a flightiness that does not seem to originate in his muscles or bones, a continuous inner fire like the slight dance of a candle-flame in still air.  He can keep his posture so perfectly straight that an elf looking him in the eyes might not notice the way he is flexing and pointing one foot at a time, bending his toes back, holding one foot at his ankle to balance on the other.  He is forever climbing trees to walk across their narrow branches on his hands – or walking clotheslines like tightropes, rolling into cartwheels off the backs of benches in the garden, and stretching casual backbends into nearby furniture.  After he surpassed his father in height, this has become as alarming as it is elegant, like a full-grown tiger stretching itself in the manner of a housecat.

“Yes, it is an offence?”  Aulë’s tone is mild but unreadable, which is all the more imposing from one of the greatest of the Gods, holding a forbidden weapon in his thick, sturdy blacksmiths’ hands.

“Yes, he has been teaching me.”

Aulë’s turns the sword over again, gazing at it thoughtfully, and then holds it out, hilt first.  “Show me.”

Maedhros glances toward the door, his whole body on edge.  There is no sign of Fëanor.  Keeping his face carefully neutral, he takes the proffered sword-hilt.  His hand fits comfortably around it; he has been practicing for hours a day, until his legs ache and his brothers have already long ago dispersed to other pursuits.  Still, he hesitates.  This is a sharpened, battle-ready weapon, not the blunted practice blades that he has grown accustomed to.

Aulë steps back and crosses his arms.

Maedhros runs through a few of the drills that he has taught himself out of the old books in his grandfather’s library, a sequence of overhead strikes and balanced footwork.  His gaze focused, making careful strikes at exact invisible points in mid-air.  He watches the Vala’s face carefully out of the corner of his eye, but his expression is still utterly impassive.

Maedhros fights in the way that his mother sculpts; he fights like Nessa dances.  It has its own rhythm, much in the way that a fast-growing vine twines around a fence – a spiral of energy too quick and clever for a logical eye to explain.  Fëanáro did not teach his eldest son the stance to go with the sword.The father only put the blade into his son’s hand, and said: _you hold it like this, see – your thumb just there – and your other hand like so – you should never need to move your grip._   And his body knew what to do.  His body knows: it knows where to catch itself to compensate for this long, thin piece of metal that is now an extension of his being.  He is _animal_ in a way to rival Celegorm: always _in_ his body, eerily aware of his place in space in a way that others find utterly disconcerting.  Maybe this comes from years of carrying two or three squirming little brothers at one time. 

He finishes with a few moves that he has improvised on his own – a backwards overhead swing at an enemy behind his head, a forward stab balanced gracefully on one foot while kicking an invisible opponent behind him.  He ends the way his father has taught him, sword pointed down at his feet, gaze lowered.

Neither of them speaks for a moment.  Then: “Why have you chosen to learn this?” Aulë uses the same genuinely curious tone that he uses to question Fëanor about his choice of metals in a particular piece of jewelry.  He hands over the sheath. “Why do you attempt this thing, which goes against the Peace of Valinor?”

Maedhros’s heart churns with simultaneous relief and disappointment as he sheathes the sword and the bright metal disappears from view.  “I did not intend to offend you with untruths and secrecy, Lord.  But nor do I think I chose this, really.  For it seems to me to be what I am _supposed_ to do: my hröa knows what to do, the way that Makalaurë’s hands know his harp.  And it makes me feel the way my father looks in his forge, so immersed in his work that there seems to be fire coming out of his eyes.  I can’t imagine I was ever meant to for anything else.  The Fate that was woven for me.  Only,” and now he is carefully replacing the weapon under the table at exactly the angle he had found it, relieved for an excuse to turn his back for a moment, away from that fiery, scrutinizing gaze, “it isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing at all.  Is it?”

“I find that _supposed to_ is not always as simple as some would make it.  You truly did not need to lie to me.”  Aulë does not directly answer the question.  “I do not believe that any knowledge should be forbidden.  Your father learned that art from his father, in broad daylight, just as he learned the art of forging weaponry from your mother’s father.  And King Finwë must have thought he was giving his son a history lesson.  But I do not think Curufinwë Fëanáro sees swordsmanship as ancient history only.”  Aulë pauses thoughtfully, for a moment.  “And as for _supposed to_ ,” his voice seems to become stronger, like the rumble of stones beneath the Earth, “I would say that depends on who is doing the supposing.”

“I love my family,” the Vala says, “in the way that you love yours, I think.  They are quite literally everything to me: the winds and the rains and the seas!  But sometimes we still see things differently.  Do you know, even they believe your old saying, I think: _never trust a blacksmith._   And they’ve been given good reason not to!  We should stick together.  I hope your father feels the same.”

There seems to be a riddle, buried in those words, staggering as they are in their near-blasphemy.  Maedhros, unaccustomed to the Valar addressing him so personally, immediately finds himself pulling back into stiff formality.  “I would hope so too, lord.”

Fëanáro and his sons are exiled to Formenos the following year.  Maedhros does not share this conversation with anyone, and he does not see Aulë again.

 

 

## Third Age, 3018, November

 

Maedhros runs lightly down the sturdy lower branches of the elms and oaks, one foot in front of the other, footsteps fleeting but solid, shoulders back.  The soles of his feet know how to feel their way through the thin soles of his boots, his lungs attentive to the texture of the air.  The soft smell of leaf-mold and late-autumn mushrooms gives way to the sharpness of fir-needles and woodsmoke.  His cloak is wolfskin, heavy against the cold, pinned on the left with an eight-pointed star in the manner now used by the Dúnedain.  His chainmail is mithril, light and thin, mostly hidden beneath leather armor.  Beneath him is the rumble of armies in the darkness.

From this angle, elvish vision can make out the shadowy form of a massive hoard of orcs and wargs sheltered in a cluster of rocks some miles to the north.  The rustle of orcish armor and the harsh murmur of their voices make the whole camp appear as some great breathing, heaving, squirming creature of shadow, hiding away from the sunlight, waiting for nightfall.  He crouches against the thick trunk of an elm, his whole body pressed against the tree, steadying himself against its trunk with his right arm, left hand on the hilt of his sword, counting, calculating.

Turning to peer in the opposite direction, where the Road winds like a pale brown river through a lattice of empty pastures and winterized corn-fields, he spots a single figure, little more than the rustle of a dark cloak in the trees, the lightness of his steps marking him as an elf.  When the elf’s face catches the light, his grey eyes are visible.

 Maedhros whistles twice, softly, imitating a type of seagull that never travels to this side of the mountains.

Elrohir’s startled face lifts to the sky, searching for the source of the sound, arrow already notched to string, pointed straight between Maedhros’s eyes.  He lowers it with a near-inaudible noise of surprise, grinning widely, raising a silent hand in greeting.

Maedhros is already swinging himself down to the next tree-branch.  There is a certain grace in climbing with one hand, trusting that hand utterly, clinging the trunk of the tree with his whole body.  He jumps from the lowest branch and lands beside the other bemused elf, who immediately scurries over silently to embrace him.

Maedhros returns the embrace, though his ears are pricked to attention.  He’s noted the positions of the various guards around the orc-camp, and this is not the safest location for a family reunion.  “Elrohir!  Of all times!  What in Eru’s name are you doing on this side of the Mountains?”  His voice is a hissing whisper, though his joy and relief are audible.

 “We’re not here at all, of course,” Elrohir answers pointedly, in the same low tone.  “We are on an important and highly confidential scouting mission from our father.”

“Good!  I look forward to hearing all about it.  But I would hate to wake our friends too early – the bears only hunt at night, you know.  Even _you_ can’t have thought two against two hundred was good odds.  Where is your brother?”

Elladan, it transpires, is hidden a safe distance away in the trees, with two of Rivendell’s finest horses and the same undisguised delight.  And then there are more whispered greetings and laughing softly together and embracing again and Maedhros is whistling for his horse, who had been waiting patiently on the edge of a nearby barley-field. 

“But that is one of the Enemy’s horses!” Elladan exclaims.  His hair is slightly shorter than his twin’s, his face slightly rounder, and he wears now several new, thin scars along the side of one cheek, that had not been there when last Maedhros saw him.

The black horse flares her nostrils and makes a noise that might be indignation.  Animals have a way of picking up on intention in Quenya, even those who don’t speak it.  “Not anymore.  Brave little shit.”  Maedhros pats the side of her neck affectionately.  “I found her running half-starved and stark mad around the plains on the border of Mordor and Rhûn.  Apparently, she’d been stolen out of Rohan, but made a run for it.”  He pulls himself easily up onto her back.  “Also – she scares the daylights out of His armies.  They were surprised to hear that so many plans had changed, I think, but they didn’t question a hooded messenger on one of their commanders’ horses. The captains of Gondor have no idea how easily they won back their city.  For some reason, a large Southron army just… walked into their trap.”

“They’ve lost it again.  You must have heard.”

“I’d heard.  I can’t be everywhere at once.  But how _did_ you know I was here?  You can’t tell me you didn’t.”

“The orcs of the Mountains know that there is a redheaded elf-warrior who fights with the Beornings.  They told us wild stories: apparently you speak the language of their wargs, and light fires with your eyes.  You could have sent word that you’d returned.  It has been so long.  And there are many Great deeds at work.  If…”

“You’re still hoping I’ll join your father, is that it?  It’s still a no.  But come!  We should not linger here.”

 

*

 

“I’ve convinced Grimbeorn to let you come hunting with us tonight.”

They are in the Beornings’ great hall, three deep drinking-vessels of mead on the table before them, thin wintery morning-light clouded by the rising smoke from a roaring fire in the middle of the room.  The tall beams of the hall are tree-trunks stripped of their bark, knots and irregular swirls visible in the sanded wood.  The fireplace cut into the floor is rectangular and unadorned, lined with stone, and the rough smoke-hole is nothing more than the absence of thatch in the ceiling above it.  The lord of the Hall is nowhere to be found, although several sheep are gathered together in one corner, speaking in their own language, and a few cats are seated at the table.  Elladan is watching one of the sheep so intently that the animal glares and intentionally turns its back as though to signify that he is being rude.

 “And you must know what a great honor that is,” Maedhros continues.  “Outsiders aren’t supposed to get to see a gathering of the Bears.  But I’ve told him that you’re likely to go after the orcs on your own if you’re not invited, and spoil all his plans.  Also, that he’s hardly keeping any secrets by insisting you stay inside, because if you wanted to know the ritual to join them, I would teach it to you.”  Maedhros is sitting sideways on one of the carved tree-stumps that sit like chairs against the wooden table, one knee drawn up to his chest, the other leg crossed under him.  A few of the sheep in the corner seem to be eyeing his posture critically.  “Which I wouldn’t,” he adds, because Elrohir looks like he is about to ask exactly this.  “You’re too young to make such an idiotic decision as that.  I’ll not cause your father any _more_ grief.  If you should die, I very much hope you’ll go straight to Mandos and get yourselves reborn as quickly as you may, not damn yourself to the Dagor Dagorath Preparation Society.”

Elrohir’s face contorts in mild indignation _._ “The lord of this Hall is barely eighty _._   You’d lived a whole life and _died_ at less than half our age.”

Maedhros gives him a look.

“Sorry, grandfather.”  Elrohir looks down at his hands in a way that might come across as abashed in an elvish royal court, but the slight upward tilt of his lips shows that he knows the other elf isn’t actually upset.

Maedhros snorts back a laugh.  “Don’t you _sorry, grandfather_ me.  Does that work on Celeborn?”  He takes another sip of mead.  “I was also too young, and also an idiot.  At sunset, if you like, you can watch the bear-dance from a respectful distance, and once we’re sure they’re snarling and hairy and toothed and fearsome, we lure the orcs toward the encampment.  Draw them out toward the Carrock.  The bears attack from behind.”

“ _Dance_ isn’t the word I was expecting.”  Elladan, who had been gazing intently around the room as though to commit each detail to memory, draws himself back into the conversation.

“A poetic liberty, maybe.  They all come into the courtyard as humans, and they eat handfuls of amanita and drink gruit-ale and dance like lunatics until the ground shakes, and they call the local wild bears to go off together and hunt in the woods.”

“So it _is_ magic,” Elrohir says.  “They do a ritual that makes them change form.  It isn’t intrinsic to them.”

Maedhros tilts his head to the side.  “You might call them magicians.  But they’re born into it, as well.  You must know this story.”

 “They’ve pledged themselves to Makar and Meássë, though they call them other names.  If they die in violence, their souls will not be lost as other mortals’, but will be taken to Their halls, to fight until the end of Arda.  In exchange, She gave them the gift of becoming Bears.  Though why they actually shapeshift, I’d never learned – there are still a few of Meássë’s devotees among the Eldar in Imladris, but they don’t change their forms.  They only look absolutely terrifying in battle.  It’s caused more than a few arguments.  Glorfindel says they’re cheats and lack honor, when he thinks Father’s not listening.”

 “He would!  But I suppose shape-shifting was a function of mortality: it was slow, and generational.  You could say they took too much mandrake.  Too much henbane, as well.  Quite a lot of gruit ale.  And all that amanita can’t have helped.”

Elrohir raises a single eyebrow in a way that looks so uncannily like his father – that is, like his father had used to look, young and unintentionally picking up on the mannerisms of his foster-father in turn – that Maedhros almost feels he has earned the title of _grandfather._

“Too much for a mortal, I mean.”  Maedhros pointedly raises his glass and takes another sip of mead; Elrohir, smirking, copies the gesture.  “And of course, no one was originally turning into animals every night.  Himring would have been nothing more than a massive stable.  That would have been a mess to clean up after, and hardly intimidating either.  _An army of wolves and bears_ is frightening, _an army who fight like wolves and bears_ , though, raving mad and armed to the teeth with the best Noldorin weapons – unafraid to use those teeth, for that matter – now, that sets fear into hearts.”  He _had_ missed being around other elves to whom he could speak freely of the past; he had told himself he hadn’t.  It has been long since he has let the name _Himring_ leave his lips.  “But at some point, they went too far – the metaphorical became the literal, and I suppose that was when they stopped wearing bearskin cloaks and became herbivores by day.  But come, you should see the apothecary!  They have a different artemisia for everything.”

 

 

## First Age, 6, November

 

 _Mandrake is the bright places in the dark of the world.  Mandrake is the stars beneath the earth._ That was how they used to sing, from a prayer that invoked Yavanna and Este and Aulë all at once.  There was a legend that Yavanna had made the mandrake as a joke-gift for her husband: a strong, deep root, a little person full of light in the dark places of the Earth.

It is Aredhel who first brings him the mandrake, amid the tents of their camp in Mithrim that clutter in the breeze with their bright banners.  She corners him intentionally after one of her father’s council meetings, waiting until her brothers and cousins have retreated, as he is about to make the journey back to his own side of the lake.  She likes to pretend that she does not mind being left out of such councils; she is almost as bad at lying about this as Curufin.

“That’s the real stuff, from Estë’s garden,” she informs him, as he slides the lid back from the jar and raises the greenish ointment to his nose, noticing but not acknowledging that she has intentionally left the lid of the jar untightened.  It has a scent like new earth tossed over a grave, like the barely-perceptible scent of blood that still clings to a sword.

 “It was my first batch after we settled here – it’s taken a while to adjust to Anar’s light in the sky, and to the new soil.  I haven’t had enough to make an extract, yet.  Just a little bit – behind your ears, back of your neck – it goes straight to your head that way.”  He sees her tighten her lips in that space where she once would have made a lewd joke about the salve’s other uses, and instead winces and keeps her gaze fixed on the jar in his hand.  Aredhel rarely meets anyone’s eyes, and in the moment this is a relief.  They have not spoken much, on this side of the sea.

“You should not waste your medicine like this.”

“It isn’t a waste,” she insists.  “I am being entirely selfish.  I want my brother to stop worrying about you and get some rest.”  Her tone is so fierce that he almost believes it.  “In any case,” she adds, “that may be the best pain-medicine to be found on this side of the sea, but you needn’t think of it as medicine at all.”  At his questioning look, she elaborates: “It wasn’t Estë who first gave me the mandrake root.  I met Meássë once, in the forest, when I was very young – I had been hunting with your brothers, and I fell behind.  She said she had been watching me.  She asked if I wanted to hunt with her – that I would learn more from riding with her than trailing after Tyelko while he trailed after Oromë in turn.  But I was afraid – you know the stories – and I refused.  It was she, who gave me that mandrake.  She said: _you can use this to reach me, if you change your mind._ Meássë is not too concerned with medicine, you know: she only brings Her warriors wine to strengthen them for the oncoming fight _._ ”

“You haven’t – ”

“No.  I’ve thought of it.  There’s been too much to think about.”

“They sided with Him.”  He is still holding the jar of ointment, hesitating between handing it back and pocketing it.  It feels somehow heavier than glass and oil should be.  “Meássë and Makar.  They Sang with Moringotto in the beginning.  They petitioned Manwë for his release.”

“They hunted him down!”

“For sport.  For joy.  And they failed at that, in any case.”

The silence between them stretches long and cold as the frozen edges of the lake.  She is still wearing the battered walrus-skin boots she had made for herself on the ice.  “Three summers ago,” she says finally, “Soon after the sun had risen, I went hunting, farther than my father would have permitted.  I heard sounds in the woods.  We were still far in the North – it was before we reached the Gates – but,” she pauses, and there is a fierce sort of awe in her tone.  “The orcs fell before they could reach me.  The elves who felled them, wore bear-skins and fought with their teeth as much as with their spears.  The Sindar who I met later, told me that the bearskin-warriors are a cult to Meássë.  That there are another group who wear wolf-skins and pray to Makar.  They eat a mushroom that fell in the places where Makar’s great horse rode in the beginning of the World.  They use the local nightshades, the one Moringotto has tainted, but they use them to strengthen themselves against him.  The King Thingol blocked them from his kingdom, for he thought them too deeply tainted by the Enemy’s magic.  But they are some of the only ones still fighting back now.”

She does not say: _you should find them, and learn more,_ or: _I want us to fight Moringotto the way those Sindar do, with tooth and claw, an ecstatic dance_ , or: _if you can’t, you really shouldn’t be building a fortress right in front of His gates._ “I will go with Turukano,” she says instead.  “Idril needs me.” Then she smiles, a guarded smile like a joke with herself.  “And I love the people of Vinyamar.  I love the way they know every seaweed on their beaches.  I love the great Marshes that stretch on for miles – I have never seen anywhere more beautiful.”  It sounds like a riddle, a buried message, one he is supposed to grasp and that she is not supposed to name.  “There is a good supply of myrica gale, and bog-rosemary there, too, if you are interested in setting up a trade.  I have been gathering it myself.”

“We will need trade, if we are supposed to be allies.”  He does not answer her unspoken questions.

“And we will need myrica ale, for that matter, if our arrival here is any indication of the future.”  But there is no grief or malice in her tone.

The next spring, only days before he rides for Himring hill, she presses a whole live mandrake-root, wrapped in a bundle of soil and cloth, into his palm.  Even in its packaging, the plant seems to pulse and squirm imperceptibly, acutely alive.

 “Partial sunlight,” she says.  “Sandy soil.  Not too much water.  Sometimes it moves.  You have to let it choose where it wants to grow.”

 

*

 

He is very used to bitter-herbs, by now.  You can get used to anything.  Vile-tasting healing droughts that leave a strange tingle around the corner of your lips and the back of your tongue, warning you that in everything is a healing, and too much of anything a poison.  Sludge of elf-blood and some sort of nutritive greens and the stimulating seeds of a gnarly tree that grew in the shadowy craigs to the south of the Thangorodrim, heated so hot it burned your throat.  You just grab your whole fëa and pull it away into that tiny room in the back of your head and wait until it is safe to come back.

You can get used to anything.  But, it is hard to care about anything, after that.  Everything is too sweet and too solid and too real.

The bitter plants that stave away pain, also raise a sort of cold fire that leaps around your core and straight up between your eyes.  That is very grounding, too, and it keeps the headaches away.

Sometimes, he enjoys taking a leaf of wormwood or leonorus and chewing on it absentmindedly while going about his day.  The expression on his face does not change.  The men will try to imitate that.  They choke the first time.  He finds great amusement in the ways they try to keep their expressions as neutral as his.  And so it becomes common-place to see soldiers of Himring nibbling absentmindedly on southernwood or rue leaves.  Infection rates stay down among the Secondborn.  Bodies stay healthy and livers functional and no one is lost to bad water or bad air, both of which Morgoth sends their way.

 

A spring of fresh water bubbles up in the center of the mountain _(they call it a hill, not a mountain – a steep, rocky hill, tall enough that one day the oceans will crash around it but the uppermost tip will remain – but it shouldn’t be said that Maedhros is living in the stone on the side of the mountain – he is not going to phrase it that way. His family are not going to phrase it that way)._ The water springs now from a carved chute cut into the stone, with tengwar prayers to the Lord of Water carved in great arches over the top, pipes diverting some of the water away, while the rest collects in a great pool with buckets for collection and distribution.

From little areas of soil around its edges, bright coltsfoot flowers burst first like fat yellow suns in early springtime, and later the wide, thick leaves are collected and steeped in the alcohol or dried for later use.  Sometimes the smog they call Morgoth’s Breath grows thick and the soldiers’ lungs begin to blacken with it and the fortress echoes with the sounds of hacking coughs, and they ration out tinctures of coltsfoot and burn the leaves to inhale the smoke and clear their screaming lungs.

This is, the Sindar say, why coltsfoot is sun-yellow: when your lungs have gone clouded, it lets the light back in.   Their word for coltsfoot comes from the word for _dot_ – you can’t miss it – suddenly the side of the spring is polka-dotted with bright yellow-gold – you can’t forget that one. _We can’t all just_ _ask the Valar themselves every time we need to know something – so Yavanna gives it a signature, wide leaves like the hoofs of ruminants with big healthy lungs, sunshine flowers, and that tells us what we need to know._ There is a kind of scorn there that the Noldor cannot dispute: having had ancestors that took the Great Journey to the land of the Gods, is no longer something to be smug about, when you’ve rejected those Gods utterly.

 

Maglor sings to the little dandelions and nettles and ground-ivy that grow out of long vertical crevices in the walls, making them stronger and greener, until in springtime little lines of bright green catch the light from deep shafts in the roof and are gathered to make a mineral-rich soup.  Later in summer, bright yellow blossoms are mixed with yarrow to make beer.   _Nutrients_ , Maedhros describes pragmatically, _self-replenishing food stores in case of siege._ Neither of them say aloud: _here there are things that are green, and grow – this fortress does not belong to the Enemy, not yet –_

The wide plains around are cool and expressionless as slate, as sea, but the stone walls inside are hung with tapestries and furs, and the barracks scattered with personal trinkets and amulets.  Bright lamps in the shape of stars are hung in strings down the corridors, the plant-life everywhere, the friendly cats who diligently keep the rats from the food-stores but will still curl up on soldiers’ feet to sleep.  They hang wreathes of mugwort in the windows to keep Morgoth’s Winds away, as well, and burn it mixed with rosemary and pine-sap.  And so the air in Himring is always very alive, with bright fragrant smoke and the strange succulent flowers that grow from the walls: a breath of relief to weary new recruits who have lived too long in the Enemy’s shadow.

And so Maedhros plants Aredhel’s mandrake, and he watches as the small root slowly takes hold of its new soil and puts up its first leaves.  When after only two springs it does not reappear in its original location in the main medicine-garden, but instead chooses to reappear amid the ferns that grow beneath the window of a dark corridor near the kitchens, he is not surprised.  And when the time comes, he is ready.

 

 

## Third Age, 3018, November

 

The trees on this side of the river are spread in long, crisscrossing rows, across empty pastures and winterized barley-fields.  Thin, cold moonlight and the howls of wargs filter through the fir-stands at the foot of the mountains, while the scuff of angry paws and booted feet against the ground is a northward-bound stormcloud.  At Elladan’s signal, Maedhros throws his head back and howls in answer, with what he hopes to be a challenge that will draw them down toward the river.  Mountain-wargish is its own distinct dialect.  But it seems that he has turned their attention in the intended direction, for answering howls now mingle with the angry shouts and startled growls of orcs attempting to regain control of their steeds.

Amanita churns and lurches through his abdomen like a wave of acrid starlight, sending nauseous waves of heat through his fingertips.  His hearing has become so sharp that he feels dizzy.  He has not often taken Makar’s mushrooms in recent centuries, but is key that the Beornings feel that he is one of them.  And if their rituals in peacetime are a sight to behold, their war-dances are a spectacle he would not miss the opportunity to join.  He lets absolute focus on the oncoming army keep him grounded and alert: let yourself slip, and the mushrooms will force you into Irmo’s realm.  It’s best to stretch or pace or fight, make the blood rush to the brain – to utilize that simultaneous heaviness and weightlessness that make him more than his body.  Sometimes, after he takes Makar’s mushrooms, a flash of energy catches him at unawares, and he will run barefoot for miles for the pure joy of it, as Makar once chased Morgoth’s retreating shadow like a blur of bloody-handed lightning.

He waits until they are directly between him and the river, before he repeats the call.  The hood of his wolfskin cloak falls back.  Now orcs are visible, red eyes painted on their shields, armed with sword and club and mace.  Their great wargs are nearly as tall as horses, bristling grey hair catching in the moonlight, noses to the air, searching for the source of the call, whining softly at their masters’ whips.

Amid the confusion, Elrohir’s bow takes down five orcs before they have realized they are under attack.  Now wargs are shaking their heads around, turning so sharply that their orc-riders are nearly thrown.

As Elladan emerges from his hiding-place near the river, sword raised, the same acute anger flashes in his eyes as that which Maedhros remembers from the day they had first met.  Elladan has never wearied of his vendetta against orc-kind, and he fights as one with a personal vendetta against each orc.  When Elrohir joins him, they move like one being, furious and swift.

Maedhros lets the mushroom remind him to hold himself the way the wolves do: nose to the air, knees bent, don’t let your throat close.  Know the ground with your feet, feel the strength of your body as a coiled string, the energy pulled down into your core and ready to lash out.  He jumps to slit the throat of the first warg from a high stab, as the animal backs up with a snarl of angry fear.  Its blood is black and viscous as an orc’s, splattering across the moonlit soil, staining his boots.

The trees rustle as dozens of bears stomp from their lurking-places in the undergrowth.  Orcs are clambering over fallen wolves, backing into an angry ring, snarling.  Bears are ripping shields from orc-hands, clawing out eyes, their ruthless screams on the air.

Grimbeorn in bear-shape roars wildly on his hind legs, teeth bared, as he leaps out of the cave at the base of the Carrock.  He fights back-to-back with the Carrock in the way that Elladan and Elrohir do with one another.  Wargs he tosses into the river at the base of the rock as though offering violent sacrifice to Meássë Herself.  And it seems that some force within the rock is dragging the enemies in toward their deaths, for the orcs are caught between bear-claws and Carrock like a great stone shoulder leaning in.  Black blood stains the side of the stone, swirling like congealed ink into the dark water.  Though it does not visibly move, Maedhros thinks he feels a strange vibration coming from the rock, like a many-colored earthquake.  Orc corpses float face-down in the river.

A nearby grizzly bear lifts an orc-corpse in his mouth and flings it at an oncoming orc.  Maedhros throws a knife which lands deep in the forehead of the nearest orc, pulls his sword from the belly of a fallen warg.  He looks up and catches Elladan’s eyes.  The younger elf is laughing in the way Elros might once have laughed, with that comfortable joy in fighting that his brother had never quite emulated.  “Too easy altogether!” he shouts over to Maedhros, “it’s a pity we don’t have more of your shapeshifting friends in the west!”

Their eyes are bright with victory when they spot the shadowy form lurking nearby like a dark-cloaked battle-spirit, little taller than an elf, seemingly formless at first.  As figure slinks through the trees, its hulking body becomes visibly spiderlike, and the wisps of cobwebs dangling in its wake flutter in the moonlight like silver ghosts.  Maedhros can hear the clicking of its pincers amid the mess of snarling animals around him.  As he attempts to fight his way toward this new threat, he catches sight of Elrohir fitting an arrow to his bow.

Elrohir’s frown deepens as he aims his bow into the darkness, staring intently into the space where the creature’s face must be.  And in the second that he hesitates, biting his lip, the Spider opens its twisted mouth wide to shift forward a few paces on the many-jointed legs that float its hunching body over the ground.

Elladan’s spear comes from somewhere behind them, catching the creature squarely in the eyes.  He darts forward to retrieve it, kicking the great Spider-corpse onto its back and staring down into its many lifeless eyes.  Then he turns on his brother.  “What were you _thinking_.”  Time seems to stop for a moment, as the two appear to exchange a silent, furious osanwë disagreement.

“I thought I could see – but never mind.”  Elrohir shakes his head as though to clear the thought from his memory.  Maedhros has seen Elrohir fell a barrow-wight with only a song, solemn and cold, only to fall to his knees weeping afterward – _I thought I could see how they might have been, when they were alive_.  Now he is staring down at the corpse, the many articulations of its hairy legs bent strangely in death.  There is something hard and terrible and unsure in his eyes, as he turns back to the battle at hand, where bears scream an angry chorus in every pitch and tone. 

 

*

 

 “Many years ago – ”

“You are going to have to specify, friend.  I’ve you call my great-grandfather’s time _not too long ago._ ”  Grimbeorn lays a massive stone, nearly half the size of his body, in the cold ashes of the pyre he had built earlier that morning, another mark in a long trail of tall cairns that runs across the open space to the east of his house.  It is sunset, and the sounds of celebrations filter through the thorn-hedge.  Three of the wild bears have fallen in battle, and their bear-names are roared again and again, strangely guttural in the now-human throats of their companions.  Grimbeorn had spoken great words of heartfelt loss and regret, as they had gathered before the pyres to pay their respects, but now he is coolly conversing his way through cairn-building as though it is an ordinary daily task.

“Perhaps four or five thousand years ago,” Maedhros clarifies, ignoring the look on his companion’s face, “I was travelling far into the south of Arda, where there are Men still who neither serve nor fight the enemy.  And there I heard a legend of a great formless figure of darkness that came like a black stormcloud with eyes and teeth, a terror to behold.  It settled in the darkness beyond the mountains, where thereafter none would travel.  And the Men who saw it, feared that it would devour the Sun.  And I wondered at that: for I have seen a vast darkness who could devour light like that of the sun.”  The solidity of the rock his arms as he adds it to the new monument, like the cold on the air, is a relief after the chaotic thrill of last night’s battle.  The lingering, acrid smell of burning orc-flesh on the air crawls against his skin.

“I know where this is going.”  Elladan chooses another stone.  Though Grimbeorn had insisted that Elrond’s sons need not be involved in this task, Elladan had insisted.  Maedhros remembers this strange fascination with darkness from the other elf’s youth, when he would faithfully stop by the graves of all of the Dúnedain who had fallen in his lifetime, leaving small gifts.  There must be too many graves, by now.

“Of course you do: the centuries wore on, and the surrounding communities learned to avoid the place where that Shadow seemed to have settled, for those who did so would never return.  Those who ventured close and escaped with their lives, spoke of a spider who was bigger than an oliphant.  And some said that there were many spiders all together, and that at times they would creep out from their caves and journey away, as fledgling birds eventually leave their mother.”

“For the Spiders do not birth children: they steal elvish fëar and spin them new bodies,” Elrohir recites thoughtfully, almost to himself.  “A Spider cannot be killed by sword or spear, for they are themselves descendants of Ungoliant the Weaver, and so they shall spin for themselves a new body and a new Fate, and come again.  And their bodies are made of the stuff of the Void, and thus no Fire burns in them that can be extinguished.  Only the Void may devour the Void.”  Maedhros recognizes the quote from a book in Elrond’s library.  Perhaps because the others are watching him expectantly, Elrohir adds: “But I suppose I have never seen one so young and new-made.”

“And still – they are the Enemy’s cats!” Grimbeorn waves a hand dismissively.  “You cannot kill them by Elvish definitions, perhaps, but you can certainly put them out of their bodies, and the wood-elves have done an excellent job of _that._   Cut them off, hold a siege, wait for them to devour each other.”  He places three more stones in rhythm with his speech, as though cairn-building and spider-hunting are equally mundane activities, but the bitterness in his tone is audible.  Though the Beornings have been prosperous, their losses have been heavy.

 “A cult was formed to that Spider in the South.  The Men there offered her sacrifice of passing Elvish travelers, immortal _fëar_ with which to weave more spider-children.  And, of course, sometimes they offered themselves, or passing dwarves, for her sustenance.”

A brief, eerie pause takes hold, like waiting for the next line of a ghost-story when you already know the ending.  Elladan, casually holding a great rock almost the size of his body, pauses to look at Maedhros intently.

“That Spider I slew in body, for there seemed no other way to overthrow her hold.  She was nearly as vast as the mountains themselves.”  He does not say out loud: _and she told me that she knew me._   “The cult was disbanded, and the survivors brought back to their people for fair judgement.  The Spider, they told me, lived alone.  She had devoured the majority of her children, and the rest had eaten each other already.”

“It’s like a riddle.”  Sunset deepens on the western side of the line of cairns, red light falling behind tree-branches and lost on the horizon, and Elladan stares into it as though looking for the answer.  “They may devour one another, but always one remains.  Cold is the absence of heat.  The Void is the absence of the Fire of Life.  But she cannot eat her own stomach – where would she put it?”

Grimbeorn makes a lordly sort of gesture as though to remind the elves of whose land they are standing on.  “Enemies we have, and plenty.  Let the riddles and ghost-stories wait.”  He lays the last and smallest stone, the color of the Carrock and with the same iridescent energy, and stands back.  “The bears tells us that when their souls depart the world, they …”  Grimbeorn makes a vague sort of gesture.  “It cannot be translated.  It means: we go back to Makar, we are the essence of being a Bear, our bones in the forest will feed the trees where new bears dwell.”

They stand there in silence as the red sunset darkens to grey.  The shadows of the new cairns lengthen and then are absorbed into the darkness.  At last Grimbeorn turns aside, while the others head for the gate in the hedge and the welcome glow of firelight.  He says, “I will hunt alone tonight.”

 

 

## First Age, 455, August

 

Even before he had dedicated himself to Makar, an animal was stuck inside his ribs like its cage, baring its teeth and whimpering _._   In battle, that trapped creature fought like its own being – as though the strange, disconnected part of him that still felt like a thrall, was now armed and unchained.  That animal-rage fell naturally into place, after he invoked Makar.  A few drops of mandrake steeped in whisky, a few fresh amanita mushrooms rolled into themselves and swallowed whole, a breath of henbane-smoke, and his body said: _yes, I am something more alive than an elf, more deeply mortal. When I howl, the forest shakes._

Maybe this is why they flee before his face: he moves like a cat but he rages like an injured wolf.  Eventually, can once again bend back almost to the ground behind him, stab an enemy and come up in one motion, fluid as water.  The blood and life-force that come rushing to his head all at once, make such moves feel as though his forehead has been struck by lightning: a roar of white noise in his ears, a jolt of fire through his body.   As though the harder he fights, the more he bends and contorts his body, the more he _is_ Makar.  Makar is the rage in him, the need to fight; and Makar is the mushroom who shows his body how to move; and he _is_ Makar who spars with Tulkas in his somber halls on the edge of the World.

It is hard to come down.  More than once, after a victory he lets Maglor take over command for a few hours while he vanishes into the nearby forest to calm himself – _tracking down survivors_ , they call it, and certainly no orc in his path stands a chance.  He drinks frantically from the river until he feels ill, claws angrily and the bark of trees, and lies down in the moss, heart pounding, jittering and unsure.

Fingon finds him sometime after their armies briefly converge amid the chaos of the Dagor Bragollach, leaned up against a tree, breathing heavily, pupils dilated wide, ears twitching.   Ordinarily, sound catches the irregular crevices of his ears at odd angles that make his hearing as frustratingly limited as a mortal’s, but Makar’s mushrooms make his hearing so sensitive that he can make out fragments of conversation from his brothers’ camp, over a mile away.  He’s caught each of his cousin’s near-silent footsteps, and the tiny splashes of fish flipping in and out of the nearby river, and the talons of hawks and crows perched high above them in the trees.

Fingon kneels with a strange look on his face, like reaching out to a familiar dog only to find it wild and rabid.  “Are you alright?” he asks.

Maedhros tries to meet his eyes.  Something in his foot feels broken.  There is an arrow through his leg, which he had broken shorter for practicality and then ignored.  He could not stop fighting.

He opens his mouth to say, _Perfectly alright,_ at exactly the same time as Fingon notices the arrow.

 

_(“You terrify me,” Fingon had said one very drunk night.   “I won’t lie, you terrify me utterly.  What kind of elf doesn’t scream when you cut off their hand?   I would have been shrieking.”_

_“Give me the wine,” Maedhros had said, even drunker.  “I suppose you want me to say something terribly brave or terribly sad.  I shan’t say either.  I can’t!  I hardly know what is going on in this_ hröa _any more than you do.  It’s like riding an untamed horse, except the horse is made of fire that can’t burn your skin.  And it works – it does what it is supposed to do – it fights the Enemy, it kills orcs.  So I cannot complain, really.”_

_Fingon opened and closed his mouth as though he had intended to make a comment about other uses for Maedhros’s body, thought better of it, and handed him the requested wine.)_

 

He is simultaneously aware that he is ashamed to be seen like this, aware that Fingon means no harm and that the battle has ended, and filled with the sort of desperate panic of being compromised and less able to defend himself against any potential threats.  There is smoke rising in the distance.  He can hear the soft clicking of vultures picking at the bones of orcs.

“Maedhros? I said –”

“I heard you.  Yes, I’m better than you look.”

Fingon seems surprised at this.  Maybe he hadn’t realized the wound at his own forehead was bleeding so badly.  It’s sticking in his hair and tarnishing the ribbons that hold the braids in place, and smeared across his sleeve where he has tried to wipe it away.   “Are you hearing things again?” Fingon is still crouching, balanced on the outside edges of his boots.

The red light is a bright haze on the corners of his vision.  He breathes very carefully and hopes this makes him seem normal.  The air tastes faintly of woodsmoke and orc-blood and impending rain.  “Nothing that isn’t there.”  Distant raindrops from the storm that hasn’t reached them yet.  Singing of victory-songs and the clatter of distant elves removing armor and cleaning weapons, tolling bells, hammers.

“Were you planning on letting someone see to that?” he asks cautiously, as though he suspects the answer, gesturing to the arrow still protruding from his leg.  

“I am sure that others are in greater need of attention.”  The weight of his armor is suddenly dizzying.

“Those herbs are making you fey,” Findekáno says quietly.  He does not say: _and you know that, and you don’t care, and I don’t know what to say to that._  But Maedhros can hear it freely through the open channels between their minds.  “The reindeer in the North eat those mushrooms and then drink each other’s piss,” Fingon says instead, almost cheerfully, though his voice shakes with exhaustion.  “Once, I convinced Arakáno to try some on a dare.”

“I’ve heard some of the Secondborn say that it is a reindeer god who lives in the spirit of the mushroom.  Not Makar, exactly – or at least, they would not tell me the god’s name, though I suppose that’s who they must have meant.  They seemed to think it terribly rude that I’d asked.”

“These were deer!” Fingon insists.  “Real, flesh-and-bone deer.  Mad, wild, drunken deer.  They looked so delighted to be there, in the cold, with their intoxicating mushroom-piss.  Arakáno said it was awe-inspiring.  I think he would have worshiped the reindeer-god, if he’d had the chance.”

Even this morbid attempt at lighthearted talk seems to break the spell.  Maedhros shakes the hair out of his red-rimmed eyes.  “There are Moriquendi who say that the mushrooms are Makar’s gift to the deer, and that the deer do his will.”  They say that the amanita falls where the red spittle of Makar’s horse landed when he would hunt in the early days of Arda.  Fingon will not even mention Makar’s name now, in the same way that he rarely mentions the Oath.  Somehow they deliberately continue on, refusing to acknowledge the looming inevitability of the Timeless Void or the Halls of Endless Battle.

There are a clump of bright amanitas growing blood-red beneath a cluster of nearby birch-trees.  Maedhros leaves them an offering of whiskey, and thanks Makar for their brief victory.

 

 

## Third Age, 3018, November

 

The compound has grown quiet as the now-human Beornings have scattered back to their dwellings along the edge of the Greenwood.  Thin, wintry sunlight illuminates Beorn’s apothecary, where Elrohir is carefully shelving a few small bottles amid a larger arrangement of carefully-sealed clay pots: medicines that do not grow outside of Imladris, _in gratitude for your hospitality and in hopes of continued friendship_ , as he had put it.  Softly he sings under his breath an old Noldorin hymn that Elrond often uses in healing ceremonies, smiling to himself as though lost in thought, carefully not meeting Maedhro’s eyes.  But Maedhros feels the gentle slowing of his pounding heart, and suspects that the song is meant for him.  There is a gentle vibration in the air, mingling with the smell of mandrake-smoke that always pervades this room, and sending a shiver of relief all of the way up his spine.

Elladan is pacing back and forth across the small space, making rapid, graceful hand-gestures as though partially reenacting his news of all that has gone on since he had last seen Maedhros.  He jumps between tales of recent battles, descriptions of the current political situation in Lórien, a few possible routes for a theoretical quest which might or might not have to pass over the mountains, as well as the possible relevance of a strange, sinister creature that he had helped one of the Dúnedain to capture some months before.

As he listens, putting in a word here and there, Maedhros pulls jars from several different shelves and holds them out expectantly, one at a time.  “Grimbeorn sends these to your father,” he had said pointedly.  “Or he would have, if he hadn’t already presumed that I would.”

Elrohir unloads the bottles on the windowsill, holding them up one at a time to sniff at the contents as he continues his discussion of the increasing threat of wolf-packs, loyal to Sauron, roaming farther south than they had ever before dared.  At the last jar, containing a thick, oily salve, he wrinkles his nose and frowns.  “This one I don't recognize.”  He holds the jar at arm’s length and peers inside.

Elrohir, who has long shared his father’s love of medical botany, breaks off his song mid-verse and takes the jar from his brothers’ hand.  He sniffs it, holds it in his hands as though trying to read its energy through the jar, hesitates, and finally dips a finger into the viscous substance within.  “Mandrake, but not mandrake,” he finally pronounces, sounding surer than he looks.

“Valinorian mandrake.  Grimbeorn traded for that,” Maedhros says matter-of-factly.  “He has no idea where it came from.  He knows nothing about this.  It certainly isn’t growing in his medicine-garden.”  He notes that both of their eyes immediately go to the window, and the garden beyond, grey with winter.  “He seemed to find my insistence on keeping a _plant_ secret, to be rather absurd.  But Sauron has never touched that one, and there are few fates it won’t protect you from.  I would send you with a whole root, if the ground weren’t frozen solid.”

Elrohir opens his mouth as though with an unspoken question, but Elladan has already picked up a basket of dried amanita, a dusty red color like old blood.  “Once, Argonui tried some of those, on a dare from one of his followers.”  Elladan chortles.  “They use them in the outer villages of Bree-land, mostly to improve stamina, for haymaking and the like.  Or when the ale stores are running thin.  He claimed that he heard the spirit of the mushroom tell him to confess all of his wrongdoings.  Also, to imitate the calls of ducks and chickens.  He couldn’t look us in the eyes for months.  Elrohir would always tease him about the way he’d – ”  He falls silent at the look on his twin’s face.

Elrohir is absentmindedly staring at the bundles of yarrow hung from ceiling-beams at the back of the room, tiny bone-white daisies dried brittle, their feathers sharp as papercuts.

Maedhros sees where he is looking.  “However this may end, it won’t be without heartbreak.”

“Father always says: _the herbs for bruises are the herbs for heartbreak._   When I was young, I thought it very poetic.  But he got that from you, didn’t he?”

“Bad blood, unreleased, festers.  Blood that does not flow, lets the Void in.”  Maedhros suspects this is the next line of Elrond’s saying.  The heart stores emotional memory; the blood moves the story.  Yarrow that clears bad blood from around a wound, also clears the darkness from a broken heart.  They used to make a lot of yarrow beer, in Himring.  Something happens when it is left to ferment.  All of that blood-movement comes alive.  _Hard-headed,_ they named it, and _fistfight-plant_.  Too much, and your anger is flowing all at once: soldiers spar nearly to the death for the pure red angry wild joy of it, and there are brawls in the hallways.  They would ration it carefully before battle.  The Beornings have made that careful rationing into an art-form.  “Maybe that is why the Beornings are the way they are.  Heartbreak does not seem to phase them.”

 

*

 

Sometime after sunrise, Maedhros sits alone in the three-walled room to the back of Beorn’s great hall, looking out across the sleeping, snow-dusted garden.  He smokes from a wooden pipe, Rivendell-made, an old gift from a younger Elrohir.  And as he lights it from a beeswax candle on the table before him, the angle of the flame swooping into the pipe from the burning wick gives the illusion that he is drinking fire straight from candle to throat.  He pauses, then begins to absentmindedly run his finger through the flame, again and again, too quickly to burn.  The warmth of the flame sends a tingle through his heart, like greeting an old friend.  The star-shaped burn-scar across his palm becomes more starkly visible with the movements of his hand.

Now he holds his hand around the side of the candle, looks into the flame intently, and moves his hand around the candle in a slow, swirling pattern, a few inches away from the flame.  The way the angle of his hand changes the direction of the flame, makes it seem to dance like an elf, pulled by puppet-strings.

But then Maedhros holds his steady hand behind the flame, concentrating all his attention there, and the flame doubles in size.  It seems to dance again, this time moving against the wind.  After a few moments of focused silence, in which it seems to him that he is the fire and the fire is him, he raises his hand almost a foot above the candle, drawing the flame with it.

Finally, he lowers his hand until the flame settles down to its usual height.  “I will see you again later, friend,” he says to it, and there is a strange, nonverbal affirmative in its glimmering light.  He puts the candle out with the palm of his hand.

“Have you always been able to do that?” He had not realized that Elladan was watching.  His gaze is still fixated on the extinguished candle, and his tone is hesitant, as though intruding onto a private conversation. 

“No.”  A soft smell of beeswax lingers in the air.  After a moment, Maedhros elaborates: “It was after I was reembodied.  Do you know, it took me a long while to even realize.  The Lord of Everything Below the Earth unfortunately did not think to provide an instruction manual.”

“So is it true that you…”

“Set fire with my eyes?  Not precisely.  A slight of hand – though, the orcs did find it mighty impressive.”  He reaches again for the half-empty vessel of mead on the table before him.  “It is fantastically useful, especially when there are dragons involved.  But you need to get the fire to trust you first.  It’s alive, you know, and quite as unpredictable as its God.”  Maedhros, who had been sitting on the table, relocates back to one of the wooden seats. 

Elladan hesitantly settles down beside him, glancing between the otherwise-empty room and the table piled high with bread and cakes and butter and honey, and finally reaches for a piece of bread.  “I had a dream,” he says, “though I had not thought that I slept: only, a voice told me that I should return to my father with all haste, and then I awoke.  We _did_ come rather out of our way to find you.  Maybe it is, that my father’s theories are true.  Certainly, great deeds are afoot.  To whatever end.”

“I will be leaving now, as well.  Perhaps I will see you in Gondor, if the Valar allow.”  He reaches for the pipe again.

“Do you eat _anything_ but mead and smoke?”

“You sound like Makalaurë,” Maedhros says wistfully.  He sets the pipe back down and pulls a full plate of the honeycakes toward him, proceeding to shove two whole cakes into his mouth at once.

Elladan rolls his eyes, but his mood seems to darken.  “Then I will ask once again, though I hardly expect a better answer: why do you not go to him?”

 “My brother is happy.  He is _happy_.”  He begins to nibble at another cake, more slowly this time.  “After the terrible fate I dragged him through, he sings like one who has hope again.  And he has no sense of duty to me, and so he is free.  That is what I want.  Not to selfishly beg his forgiveness and have him feel obligated to me again.” 

“I think your brother loves you beyond obligation.”

 “I did not mean to imply otherwise.  Still: he has _family_ now, family who aren’t sparring each other endlessly in Makar’s halls, family who have no curse.  And I _am_ keeping an eye on him, you know.”

“Then there is truly nothing I may say, that might convince you to return with us.”  His voice is halfway between a question and a statement.

“If anyone could, Elladan, it would be you.”  A few hungry sparrows are picking at empty seed-heads half-buried in the snow, their feathers rustled by the sharpening wind.  The bee-hives are silent in their winter slumber.  “As I said on the day I met you: I will not swear you to secrecy, because I would never swear you to anything.  But for the love of your father, and my brother, please respect me in this.  They are better off not knowing I am here.”

 

 

## First Age, 587

 

There is a flipside to Maglor’s longwinded treatises on the uses of metaphor: Maedhros was hung by his right wrist from the side of a mountain for thirty years.  That is not a metaphor.  That is not an allegory.  It sounds like hyperbole, but it wasn't.  It’s been commemorated in poetry, but it did not feel poetic.

The Moriquendi have songs about spirit-flights on the wings of flying-plants: they say, _in my dream, Irmo brought me deep into the depths of hell, I was dismembered and cooked in a great cauldron of Nienna's tears, I flew back to the land of the living with the wings of Manwë’s birds, oh holy Valar above._  They write great heroic ballads about it.

Maedhros was mutilated and maimed and carried back from the depths of hell on the back of an eagle.  That is all.  No romanticism.

But to the poets, it’s not romanticism, precisely: it’s the soul pulled out and splayed naked in music, like gutting a bird.  Song makes emotion into matter, the way the body gives substance to the fëa.

The Moriquendi say that is how healers are made: they are metaphysically pulled apart until they have seen the sharp transience of their own bodies.

Elvish warriors are not supposed to become healers, and kinslayers least of all.  You are tainted.  All that death gets inside your bone-marrow.

The Easterlings say that mandrake-roots grow in the place where Men have taken their own lives.

On Yule, it is a Noldorin custom to write down the things that have brought sorrow this year, and toss them into the bonfire.

 These are a few of the thoughts rushing lightning-fast through his head, in the seconds after he jumps.

Up until the moment that his feet leave the edge of the chasm, his only thought has been _I failed I failed I failed._ The heat of the fire reminds him of Sauron’s forge in the depths of Angband – the air so hot you want to turn your face away.  He does not turn his face away.

He remembers the elves he’s seen die in pools of their own blood and in swathes of dragon-fire and under the whips of balrogs, all praying to the Valar _please, please, end this_.  And he thinks, bitterly: _so your Curse is fulfilled, Mandos.  Are you?_

He is overcome with gratitude that death will hurt.  He wants it to hurt.

He burns so quickly that it does not hurt.  Like Fëanáro, he is suddenly fire.

Then comes a terrifying sense that he is simultaneously gasping for breath and no longer needs to breathe.  Next, a surreal moment in which grief becomes awe – all at once, he feels that the depths of Arda itself is one great cauldron filled with the Fire of Life itself, living energy embedded in the molten rock, making and remaking.  And then –

 

 

“Bring me that sword under the table behind you.”  Aulë has lordship over all the deep places from which metal is mined for sword-smithing, and his tone leaves no room for question.

Maedhros, who has just felt the fires that the dwarves call _Mahal’s Forge at the Center of the World_ melting his bones along with his flesh, finds that he is already pulling the sword out from behind a pile of his father’s discarded projects beneath a nearby table, and silently presenting it to the Great Smith with two steady hands.  He is wearing the same style of light tunic that they had worn in Tirion, the fabric finer and brighter than any that had been woven in Middle Earth, embroidered with his father’s star in gold thread.  Everything up to this point he had anticipated.  Betrayal and failure and shame and suicide were predictable, possibly inevitable.  But here is the God he least expected to stand before, after his death.  And though it feels that everything in his fëa is reeling and screaming, his knees will not let him kneel.

Aulë unsheathes the sword.  Firelight reflects reddish-gold from the star laid in the hilt.  Maedhros has not seen that sword in centuries; he had been wielding it on the day that he was captured.  “Your father has been teaching you to use it?”

“No, my lord, of course not.”  Maedhros is as startled by how _young_ his own voice sounds, as he is by the fact that he does not seem to have control over his own speech.  It is much the same as watching a memory play out inside his mind on a sleepless night, knowing exactly what he _should_ have said, unable to change the past. 

“It is an offence to lie to one of the Valar, you know,” says Aulë.  Their eyes meet, fire to fire.  All at once, Maedhros is acutely aware that wherever _here_ is, the Vala is here, in this memory, as well.  The thought makes his stomach churn with shame once more, and he would either bow or run, but still his body does not heed him.

 “Yes, my lord.”  He can smell the woodsmoke in the fireplace.  And he can feel the ghost of that strange tingle on his skin that he had forgotten, the buzz of the treelight from the open window against his body.  His memory-self looks away from the Vala in nervousness, and the wrenching, nauseous shame and confusion running through his fëa makes this all the easier.

“Yes, it is an offence?”  And it seems to him that Aulë’s gaze is one of pity but not condescension.  And the Lord of Everything Below the Earth, who he had once thought to be examining Fëanor’s handiwork in truth, seems now to be feinting interest in the blade, focusing intently on Maedhros out of the corner of his eye.

“Yes, he has been teaching me.”  His younger voice sounds weakly defiant in his own ears, like an elfling caught breaking some minor rule.  He feels acutely the ways in which he is subtly fidgeting, and is amazed by the utter lack of pain in his shoulders and spine.  His posture is so _open_.  He had not realized how defensive his stance had become.

As Aulë holds the sword up into the tree-light filtering down through the skylights, it seems almost to glow.  He holds it out, hilt first.  “Show me.”

Maedhros stares at the Vala.  His eyes stray to the closed door.  And it seems indeed that this must be meant to test him, but he is already reaching out to take the proffered weapon.His right hand wraps around the sword-hilt with the same youthful, optimistic ease with which he had held it on that first day.  He hesitates, wondering whether muscle-memory will guide him through this.  The last time he had held a sword, he had slain the silmaril-guards in Eonwë’s camp.  And if only they had slain him first –

Aulë steps back and crosses his arms, an action that had seemed pensive and nonthreatening when they had been casual acquaintances, and now renders his looming form more intimidating than Mandos himself.  The tools hung in his belt are nearly as large as the weapon in Maedhros’s hands.

Maedhros’s memory-self already knows what to do.  There is something mesmerizing, he thinks now, about the way his wrists spin past each other as he whirls the blade from side to side with both hands firmly gripping the hilt of the sword.  It reminds him of the way you might hold your hands behind a candle to make the shadow of a bird appear on the wall.  This body that had seemed so very adult, now seems to him reminiscent of the way young goat-kids butt at each other and wrestle on supple legs that slide out nearly sideways beneath them: more flexible, less solid.  You hardly notice that you are holding your shoulders at a certain angle to avoid the pain there, favoring one foot or the other, until suddenly that pain is gone.  But his memory-body keeps moving, proud and fast, brows furrowed in concentration.  He notes every angle at which an enemy might be able to attack his younger self.

He finishes in the same proud stance, his gaze attentively aligned with this blade that will one day stain the havens of Alqualondë with bright elf-blood.

There is a harrowing moment of silence, in which Maedhros’s stomach lurches as bottomless as if he were still falling into the chasm.  Then: “Why have you chosen to learn this?” Aulë asks, with the same genuinely curious tone, but there seems to be hardness to it that he had not caught the first time.  “Why do you attempt this thing, which goes against the Peace of Valinor?”

They lock eyes.  And he would say _because I was young and an idiot,_ or _but there is_ nothing _that I may I do now, that all should not be not angry with me for ever._

Yet all Maedhros can do is take the proffered sheath, and watch that beloved, hateful blade disappear from view.  “I did not intend to offend you with untruths and secrecy, Lord.  But nor do I think I chose this, really.  For it seems to me to be what I am _supposed_ to do: my hröa knows what to do, the way that Makalaurë’s hands know his harp.  And it makes me feel the way my father looks in his forge, so immersed in his work that there seems to be fire coming out of his eyes.  I can’t imagine I was ever meant to for anything else.  The Fate that was woven for me.  Only,” and as his younger body ducks down to replace the sword in its haphazard hiding-place, he only wishes he could join it, could conceal himself from Aulë’s scorching eyes on his back, “it isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing at all.  Is it?”

“I find that _supposed to_ is not always as simple as some would make it.”  Aulë’s response, expected as it is, hits him like another wave of red-hot molten stone.  And there is something about the God’s intonation that rattles him to the core of his fëa, not _tearing_ him apart in the manner of Morgoth, but almost _dissembling,_ in the manner of a smith taking apart the pieces of a broken tool.

But maybe it is neither his voice or his gaze that burns; for the memory has melted into sightless, pulsing lava once more.  He smells, but cannot feel, molten stone around him and in him, and the almost-familiar feeling of being hammered together like a piece of metal.

He awakens amid smooth, unearthly rivers of cooled, hardening lava and thick, choking smoke and ash that clouds the air around a great mountain that he has never seen.  His naked body is identical to the one that he had cast into the fire, but for a blackened, star-shaped mark in the center of his palm.


	5. Veritable Darkness Itself

_“Strange gods preside in this temple._

_They move in the shape of_

_mandrake roots_

_draped with strands of the eggs of frogs,_

_their black eyes filled with stars.”_

_-_ Eryn Rowan Laurie, “On the Origin of Dreams”

_“They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought.  Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all.”_

_-_ J.R.R. Tolkien, _The Return of the King_

 

 

## First Age, 1

 

As an elfling, Aredhel had chewed at the sides of her fingers like a cornered animal when family duties had kept her inside for too long.  One of the old scrolls in her grandfather’s library named this behavior _wolf-biting_ : wolves in captivity, the scroll had said, will chew off their own limbs in an antsy rage.  But when lamps are too bright, or family gatherings too crowded, the action grounds her.  And when her distraught parents seek Estë’s council, the Lady of Healing only says: _this is not my domain, this is not a thing in need of healing._

On the Helcaraxë, she nibbles and sucks at her own near-frostbitten knuckles and fingertips until the blood rushes to her skin.  The feel of her hands against her teeth and teeth against her hands, is proof that there is still something left of her underneath the icy winds, something red underneath blue-grey fingernails.  The ocean stretches on forever like a flat cloth spread across a table, textureless and grey.  Sometimes the snow on the wind is blown so thickly that she cannot see her own hands held in front of her face.  If the snowflake is the undreamt-of creation that arose when Morgoth’s power met that of Ulmo, the Helcaraxë is the pinnacle of this meeting: a beautiful enemy whose teeth of ice are fairer and more terrible than any jewel.

There are no lights by which to measure time, but after they have been marching for what must be years, she dreams of Meássë.  And though the Vala’s form is almost like to that of an elf, her eyes are those of a bear, round and dark and fierce, and the cloak she wears is bearskin.  In her right hand is a spear, and her face is painted for war.  Blood spatters her armor, and a deep red like blood or wine stains the corners of her mouth.

“But I did not call to you.”  Aredhel’s voice is thin and uncertain in her own ears, hardly audible over the roar of the wind.  And for a fleeting moment Aredhel expects armies to ride out of the darkness, and the great doors of Meássë and Makar’s hall on the edge of the World to open wide like the mouth of a wolf and claim her for ever, whether she will it or no.

 “Call to me?  Little elf, I do not come only at your call, for I am not bound to the calls of Ilúvatar’s children!  But I oft come to hunt in this land.”  And as the vala raises her spear, Aredhel sees now that amid the ice that has engulfed her dreams and is all she knows in her waking vision, are polar-bears, skirting in and out of the mist.  They stalk one another from behind great snow-banks.  “The polar-bears spar with one another, to keep warm in the cold and to keep themselves in fighting-shape.  Did you know that?” Meássë asks.

“I have seen it.  I thought they fought in truth, but they lay down together afterwards.  We ate them.”  She speaks those last three words half-defyingly, with the same determined rebellion that has carried her onward, step by frozen step – but this only seems to please the goddess before her.

“When they spar,” Meássë says, “I am there with them, even though I may sit in my own halls with my spear across my knees.”

Meássë locks eyes with the nearest bear: those same eyes that are lined with thick, dark lashes, stark against the creature’s white fur.  The animal approaches in a posture that is halfway between attack and submission.  Their fight thunders the ground, though the ice does not crack.  They fight with growls like the grinding of the ice, and though at times Meássë seems still to be in elf-form, at times, by some trick of dream-vision or the starlight on snow, she seems herself to be a bear.  They fight like the blizzard that had taken Elenwë: snow like walls of muscle and teeth, colliding.

And when it is over, Meássë pulls back her spear from the bear’s chest, and its blood spatters her hands.

“They call your people kinslayers as though this is the worst of all crimes,” Meássë says.  “But in doing so, they misunderstand Death Itself – yes, even Námo!  I am in every bear, and I am kin and queen and mother to them.  And still I hunt – even though I do not require the nourishment.  The bears sense me coming, and they know already that I am them, and that they will die with honor, and that I will uphold their honor in death, that I am what makes them come again!  Much as your people gave the Lord of Death something to keep him busy.  He was become a dull and wearisome neighbor.”  Her laugh is a snarl that shows her pointed teeth.

“I am not a kinslayer,” Aredhel says, and she tries to hold herself proudly, but her voice falters.

The dream ends.

 

*

 

But one day, there are _trees_ again, dwarf-willow bent double to keep itself warm, thick with age and shriveled into the poor soil, low alders set into the cracks of half-frozen streams.  And then there are berry-shrubs clinging to the ground, and tall firs and pines, lustrous by the light of Tilion’s first rising.  They wander the sunlit woods like wide-eyed children, spellbound by the living greenness of the world after so long with only grey ice and silver stars.

They sleep in trees, those first nights.  They sleep with eyes open and the rough skin of Yavanna’s children against their weary spines, and the trees send sparks of warmth straight into their frozen spirits.  And they remember again how it feels to be living beings surrounded by living beings, and not tiny pinpricks of light in a sea of ice.  Every plant seems to be coming into bloom at once, as though the new Sun has brought a sudden rush of energy that overrides any natural cycle of life.  Her body intrinsically knows now that it is safe to spread its heat out again, that she does not have to pull all of her warmth into her core anymore.

Hunting in the great fir-forests to the north of Hithlum, Aredhel harvests eager handfuls of bittersweet-berries and rubs them frantically into her own hands and feet until the sharp red juices stimulate the circulation there.  It is strange, to feel her body remembering once again that she does indeed have fingertips. _“Do not put your fingers in your mouth!”_ she cautions the others.

She stares down at her tingling berry-stained fingers, blood-red as Alqualondë.  Her eldest brother is clearly thinking the same thing.  She holds out a handful of the crushed berry-juice.  “Do not put your fingers in your mouth!” she says again, the friendly teasing lost before the flat words leave her lips.

“I’m not an elfling, little sister,” Fingon says, and she knows they are not talking about narrow-dosage medicines anymore.  Bursts of blood-red dye catch in the lines of his palms, and he blinks, winces in surprise at the prickling heat rushing to his hands.

For all her warnings, it is she who ends up chewing the skin and nightshade-juice alike from the sides of her fingers, left alone to guard the camp with her youngest brother while her father and elder brothers scout ahead for the clearest path.  But the poison does not seem to harm her: she does not feel nauseous or dizzy, only red, red as the battle she had neither fought nor condoned nor rejected, red as her brother’s hands that night when he would not speak and would not answer their questions while the red red fire blazed across the sea, red in all her rage and damnation.

 

*

 

After her cousins retreat to the south shore of Mithrim like dogs with their tails between their legs, their camp of mismatched tents and hastily-constructed wooden buildings swings open like a ghost-town.  She plants the mandrake that Meássë had given her so long ago, in what must have been her cousins’ abandoned garden, with its fence of sharpened sticks pointed outward like a small fortress.  It looks like Curufin’s doing: brambles caught in practical trellises of rope, careful rows of winter roots.  He must have planted it just as the sun first rose.  He would have wanted to test the new light.  He would not have waited even a moment.

She uproots all of his radishes and washes the soil from them in the lake, laughing with an angry but genuine joy as she distributes them amongst Idril and the other elflings.  “Here!” she says.  “We’re earned these more than the ones who planted them, many times over.”

“It does no good,” her father scolds later, “to be teaching elflings bitterness.”

“If the elflings are bitter,” she replies, “that is not my doing.”  Aredhel had never truly planned on having children of her own; she’d become a mother the moment she had grabbed her screaming niece from the ice that had claimed her sister-in-law.  She had never prepared to say the right thing.

And indeed, every fruit they find in this land is the sweetest they have ever tasted – and if they are bitter, it is a bitterness that clears the blood, like chicory or dandelion.

Celegorm comes to see her soon after, as she knew he would: tagging along with Maglor under the guise of diplomacy, but looking as though he intends no such thing.  On his face is the smirk that she knew he would wear – that smug look that says, how could she _possibly_ refuse his company simply because he’d abandoned her to die?

He is right, though.  Maybe it’s spite, or nostalgia, but she humors him, with her silently fuming smile, in his garden from which she now grows food and medicine for those who had suffered because of his selfishness.  The first springtime of the world has made the plants leggy and gangly, here and there burned to a pale yellow as they struggle to adjust to their new light source.  She is harvesting calendula, pinching the blooms off with her fingernails and letting them drop into a basket of woven reeds.

“My fence is holding up well,” he says, instead of _The sun shines on our meeting_ or _I am sorry_ or even _Hello_.  In the new sunlight, his hair that had seemed silvery and gentle in the treelight is now starkly void of pigment.

“Oh, thank you!”  She feigns to be accepting a compliment.  “It took me quite a while to mend it.  The winds had knocked it down entirely.  But, you wouldn’t have had much experience with winter winds.”  She can hear the venom in her own voice, and she can see from his face that he’s taken her jab.  She returns to her calendula.  The many shades of yellow and orange piled together in her basket layer together like fire.

 “You are truly remarkable, Írissë.”  He is dressed for the autumn winds blowing chill from the lake; she is only wearing a light dress, still enthralled with the feel of the free, brisk air and new sunlight.  And she hates his gaze on her skin; she hates that he still feels he is allowed to look at her like that.  His eyelashes are pale as melting snowflakes.

“You can tell Curvo we _do_ appreciate the garden,” she says.She does not say: _and we thank you for it._   She does not say: _all of my favorite herbs are here, and I know that was not a coincidence._

“I shall.” He pauses.  “We came to this land by different paths – ”

An angry sound between a snort and a snarl escapes her throat.  Of course, this would be his definition of _diplomacy_.

“But for the same reason.  Because of a Spider who drank the light of the trees.  Because the Valar murdered our grandfather when they let the Enemy walk free.  Because you’re like me, Írissë, you don’t like to be caged – ”

“I am nothing like you,” she retorts.  “And I came here because it was too late to turn around.”  This is how they would speak with one another in Valinor, bluntly and honestly in a way that their careful, political families found uncouth; Celegorm had been the only one who did not care that Aredhel could never seem to filter her words.  Her basket is full and she is running out of ways to pretend not to pay attention to him.  She absentmindedly weeds a few of the grasses that are encroaching on the strawberry-plants, focusing on the dirt on her hands and the soft tug as the plants loosen from the earth, rather than his face.  “I think I understand,” she says finally.  “How the Spider felt when she drank the light of the trees.  Cold is the absence of heat.  And I feel I will never be warm again.  I _would_ eat the jewels right off of my rings, if I thought it would help!”

She thought she’d seen the great Spider creeping out from between hungry lips, crawling from behind pointed ears – sometimes the tips of ears would become little voids, blue then black, then nothing. The spider chattered in children’s’ teeth as they clung to their mothers’ hair with icy fingers, too cold to sob.  The Void is not, in fact, the frozen hell where she had first learned to hunt seal and walrus and to never let your fingers or ears be exposed to the wind.  The Void was the fear of it that lingered after: something worse than cold, the memory of cold, the deep-seated feeling in her bones of _Please please I’ll do anything I just don’t want to be cold tonight._

But now Idril is here, and Turgon behind her, before Celegorm can make a response.  “Oh, good!” Aredhel exclaims, with a falsely cheerful smile.  “You’ll help me bring this inside, won’t you, Itarillë?”  She holds out the basket.  “Oh, we were already finished here,” she adds, when the child looks questioningly up at Celegorm with a hardness in her eyes that is far beyond her years.

For a vindictive moment, she hopes that Turgon is indeed going to break Celegorm’s nose again, the way he’d done when she was twenty and had ridden her horse naked through the center of Tirion after losing a bet to her cousin.

But Celegorm only nods to the newcomers in a way that is certainly not a bow, and retreats wordlessly down the garden path.

And the garden-fence continues to stand.  And the little mandrake-roots flower and grow strong, even as her family threatens civil-war in their angry hunger.

 

_(That was a hopeful time, beautiful in its naivete: they thought that their losses on the Ice were great.  They thought they had earned enough reasons to be bitter.  They thought that the cold and the hunger were tragic.  They thought they were brave. They thought they were survivors.  They thought they would survive.)_

*

 

Celegorm is one of the first of her cousins to leave Mithrim, and he takes any questions about his plans for the Pass of Aglon as an intentional attempt to sabotage them.  He is sharpening his hunting-knife when she comes to say farewell, gaze focused down at the blade, and though she notes that his eyes light up to see her, he quickly re-arranges his features into their usual unconcerned grimace and pretends not to have noticed her approach.

“I hear that you are leaving soon.”  Her white skirts floating over her knees as she sits on the log beside him.  She likes that they look like ice – that she has taken Ice and made it a part of her, as it took her and froze her fëa.  She hopes it makes him uncomfortable.

“We could hardly have all stayed here forever.  I’d rather be surrounded by orcs than bickering brothers, at this point.  I hear you have plans of your own.”

“Turukáno has plans.”  She had not meant to sound so transparently bitter.  “We’ve planned another scouting mission to the coast of Nevrast.  It is a fair country, and a peaceful one.”

He frowns.  “You are not happy with this decision.”  It isn’t a question.

“Someone must look after Itarillë.  Someone must look after Turukáno, for that matter, he’s always been useless without Elenwë beside him.”  She is not sure if she had meant to say that aloud, and notes his flinch with satisfaction.  What she really would ask is, _was it you who held the torch?_ but she thinks she knows the answer and can’t stomach the idea that he doesn’t regret it.  “We _are_ grateful for the horses.  It would have been a long journey to Nevrast, on foot.”  She does not say aloud: _we ate our own horses_ or _but we’ve taken longer journeys._

 “We brought Mother’s horse here with us.  You should take her,” he says, not looking at Aredhel, though she can tell by his voice that he doesn’t want her to leave.  “Tell whoever is in the stables that I told you to.  Mother would have wanted you to have her.  I think she was more upset to lose the horse, than her sons.”

He realizes what he’s said, a second before she does.  His face does not change, though the grief in his pinkish eyes is like wildfire.  The joke crumbles in the air and falls sickeningly into the dirt, time and grief and doom hang tangible in the air between them, and she both wants and does to ask, who held _that_ torch?

“Thank you,” she finally says, her voice as soft as bare feet in moss.  She tries to stand, but Huan is stretched out across her feet, long and silky, the feel of his pulse against the tops of her toes making her whole spine tingle.  She cannot stand without disturbing him.

“He’s trying to keep you here.  He’s always preferred women,” Celegorm mutters ruefully.  He takes something from his pocket.  “Here.”  He holds it out.  It takes her a moment to realize it is one of his elk-bone carvings: a spider, hard and solid and pearly-white and unreal, like him.  “I have been thinking about what you told me,” he says.  “About the Spider who drank the treelight.”

She stares down at his outstretched hand.  “It was uncouth of me to have spoken so.” Turgon had told her as much.

“But that is what I like about you.  You’ve never cared about what _should_ be said.”  He does not say aloud: _my marriage proposal is still open._   “I have missed hunting with you.”  He is still holding out the carving.

She waits until his arm shivers with impatience and his elbow begins to sag, before she accepts the gift.  He has taken the time to make its eight eyes terribly lifelike, its legs carved with tiny hairs and sectioned into many joints like that of a wolf-spider.  “Perhaps,” she says, “someday, things will be different.”

He shrugs.  “You know where to find me.”

 

 

## Third age 3018, October

 

Ungoliant did not sing the world into being; she crawled in like a mouse that chews a hole in the foundation of a house.  She did not have a hand in the Making of Arda, nor did she feel that its creatures somehow belonged to her.  She did not seek to rule – only to eat.

Here is what the Great Tales say of Spiders: they eat the Children of Ilúvatar and also Finwëan family heirlooms and Actual Treelight, but when they are small, they are so easy to kill that a hobbit might do it.

Ungoliant could swallow gold and jewels and they made her _stronger_.  They say that She lusted for more and more, insatiable, ever seeking greater things to devour.  Where, then, did she start?

Sauron thought he’d acquired a pet.  Morgoth had only one fear.  Was Celegorm truly Huan’s master?

This is the sort of conversation that Aredhel’s family would have never had out loud.  Not in Tirion, and not in Gondolin.  Certainly not in their self-righteous march across the Ice.

To explain what she has become, is to unravel a spool of thread, around and round and round.  Threads land in a haphazard mess on the floor, and you crouch down and try to read the sigils there.

 

*

 

In her dream, her vision is focused in so that all she can see is her own hand, reaching out for a mandrake-root.  The plant is in full bloom and fruiting all at once, in a way that could never happen in waking life.  It is uprooted without the slightest disturbance to its form, pale purple flowers clinging to it in a crown, surrounded by a rosette of long, broad green leaves, and a branched root that seems to hold its arms together at its chest and gaze at her with unseen eyes.  She sees her own hand: a younger hand, dark from years of living so close to the Trees, adorned by the few silver rings that she had been wearing on the day they left Tirion, and a silver bracelet her mother had given her, lost with the death of her first body.  Her hand reaches out and takes the root from another hand: heavily freckled, ornamented with delicate copper jewelry.  She feels her hand brush against his palm, her sight still fixated so that all she can see is the smooth movement of her knuckles and the slight crinkle of the plant’s thick leaves.

Half-awake, she thinks: _but that is not what happened._ And then she awakens in full and feels the brush of Alder’s catkin-hair against her cheek, and the soft, fluttering pulse of Fox curled against her leg.  And she is held tightly in Alder’s embrace, the flutter of undying leaves against her cheek.  Alder is sleeping like the trees sleep in winter: silent and still but for a light that Aredhel can only feel when she reaches out with her heart.  And she thinks she has perhaps never felt safer than she does here, nor has she ever slept sounder.

It must be that she had fallen to sleep once more, because Aredhel awakens with her face pressed into the yellowed, frost-lined grass.  The first thing that she notices is the cold: she is cold to the bone.  And something is wrong in her skin; something is wrong in her bone-marrow.  She reaches for the mandrake-amulet that had hung around her neck.  It is not there –

only her heartbeat, pounding into her collar-bone.  That light she had felt as she lay dreaming with Alder is so sharply gone that the empty hole where it had been gapes like the Void itself.

She can feel angry bruises raising on her ribs beneath the armor-dress of that unearthly metal from Nan Elmoth, her torso throbbing in angry harmony with the sound of metal splitting wood.  An awful, shuddering gasp vibrates on the air, and a horrible rattling bites through her heart.  Fox emits a piercing whine, too frightened to use his Westron.

They have taken down the whole stand of alders that had lined this part of the river.  Wood has already been heaped into piles in places, larger trees hewn into smaller logs. Hobbits are scattering at the sight of her, a whole team of them, three-foot tall creatures bundled under cloaks and scarves.  Two of them drop their axes as they run.  She is surrounded by great fallen logs, and the places where the white wood was cut are darkening now, _darkening_ : not the usual bloody-rust color of a fallen alder, but a colorless bleeding like black orc-blood.  Or maybe this is because something wrong with her vision: it is black and grey and patterned with bursts of light.

She can see sound, but she cannot see the color of the hobbits’ clothing as they scamper away in fear.  She can hear the shape of the land in front of her.  The color has been pulled from the world, but for the iridescent glow that marks the summertime leaves, all trampled into the cold November ground, as somehow almost-alive.  There is no other sign of Alder.

Despairingly she runs between the tree-stumps and piles of timber, calling their names in the way that Alder had taught her, with her tongue behind her teeth, imitating the sound of wind rustling through branches.  There is no answer, only more bright summertime catkins, stained dark with something like elf-blood, strewn on the ground.  She realizes that there is a wound across the back of her hand, where the hobbits’ axe had grazed the unprotected skin there.  It is deep.  She is leaving a trail of blood in the grass, great splotches of it.  She feels her body hunching, drawing in against the cold.  How had she not noticed the _cold_ when she and Alder had fallen asleep by the River?

Something is very _wrong_ , like the empty space left behind when you close a book.  She is not _cold_ in the way that hobbits are cold in the wintertime, when they burrow into blankets by the fireside in their snug holes and tell ghost-stories of wolves they do not believe in.  She is the absence of heat.  She is a cold that is beyond thinking.  It is a cold that has nothing to do with sunshine or winter.  She has no fire and so she needs fuel.

She reaches next into the pocket of her skirt: the square of Vairë’s fabric that she has carried with her for so long, is still here.  She rubs the fabric between her fingers so frantically that any lesser material might be torn and as she does so, her hand seems to become more solid, the crawling-feeling recedes.  And she remembers how long ago, Alder had said: _You had the protection of the Weaver on you._   And also: _If you feed the Void, it grows._ And she thinks, _Alder, oh Alder!_ But then only, _I am so cold._

Fox is backing away from her in terror, his ears pulled back.  He turns and scampers off into the mist.

 

 

## First Age, 400

 

At first, she has no hröa.  She had no hröa, but she can feel the wind break like threads of moonlight around the outline of a body.  But moonlight should not be _sticky_ , sticky like the cobwebs that hung thick around the eves of her husband's house.

_(Sometimes at night, there would be the rattle of many great legs scraping against the roof of the hall.  “We have no need to fear the Spiders, but you must_ not _disturb them,” Eöl had commanded.  Her husband’s eyes were nearly as dark as the many-legged shadow passing across the window._

_She knew that he spoke with the Spiders, sometimes, under the light of the stars, though they never approached when she accompanied him.  She knew that Spiders had once been elves, twisted with the malice of a curse brought by Ungoliant Herself from the Endless void, just as orcs and wargs had once been elves, now creatures of darkness._

_“_ For all living things are the Spiders’ food, and their vomit darkness _,” she had recited quietly from memory, shivering, rocking baby Maeglin in her arms to the sound of spider-claws scampering against wood, high above them.   “And sometimes not_ living things _only.  You must understand: I saw the Spider who brought the Darkening.”_

_“You Noldor are like children who never learned to share,” Eöl had told her.  “Your proud lords come snatching away land as though all of Arda belongs to you.”  But he did not look angry as he spoke, only stared wistfully at his tiny son in her arms as though afraid that a Noldorin army might snatch him away at any moment. “To Menegroth I paid a tribute of weaponry and jewels, and so King Thingol shall leave us well alone.  And with the Spiders I barter also, because this land is theirs just as it is mine.  We have an arrangement.  And now you are my wife, you need not fear them.”_

_“What barter?” she had asked._

_But he’d only smiled – that fierce, secretive smile, that she’d learned in time to love, that smile that was dark as the rich forest-soil of his homeland and unearthly as his metalcraft – “Never you mind, Princess,” he had said.  “Let it go!  We are safe here, safe from the Spiders and from the Void, that is all you need concern yourself with.  We shall not go into the Darkness until it is our time.”_

_She knew that he already meant to refuse the call of Mandos, as he had once refused the summons of the Valar.  She knew that he intended that she should do the same.)_

 

Spider-threads cling to her wrists, her ankles, wrapped around her torso, pulling her forward and down, down into that darkness.  She is blind, but she can feel them all the same, at once itchy and sticky, binding and bending her _fëa_ inside a physical form.  They are weaving her: around and around, circle and tighten, like the may-pole dances she had once done in springtime.  The threads are not stuck to her, dragging her down into the darkness, as first she had thought, but rather are dangling from her as unfinished fabric from a loom.

There seem to be spiders all around her; she can see their outlines like shadows against a light.  It takes her a moment to realize that the only reason she knows this is that she does, in fact, have eyes.  But there is something wrong with her sight: there is no color, only light and darkness and movement, and peripheral vision that goes all the way around the back of her head, searching, searing through the darkness, noting areas of warmth and light and labelling them only: _food._

She is famished.  She is the all-consuming void.  She is the darkness that devoured the light of Laurelin.  She is the darkness so vast that it could hold the Two Trees’ light inside it.  She revels in this new feeling: like sitting outside of all Arda and looking in.  That is where the hunger is coming from: a luminous feeling, as though she is truly a dark void so wide that it could hold all of Arda like a spark inside of it.

 “A gift for you!” one of the Spiders croons, and it is not a language that she has heard before, but she understands it all the same.  The spider is un-weaving something that had been bound in a tight cocoon of mist, unless it were thread.  The thing is short and round, kicking with two feet, its two hands still fastened behind its back.

She cannot see her physical form: she can only _feel_ herself, the soft click of her feet against the packed hard earth.  All she knows is that she does not _care_ about the shape of her new body.  She only needs fuel.  It is as though all the fire in her has been replaced by a deep, cold emptiness.

The spiders have formed a ring around her and the creature.

It does not struggle, and it does not taste like anything but the coarse texture of beard.  Nor could she say _how_ she eats it, this bristly creature whose flesh somehow fits inside her; it is as though her body cannot choose what shape to take, now two-legged and now eight, now with pincers and a gaping mouth of fangs, now with only hands again.

She kneels there, gasping; it has only made her hungrier; and her whole body feels to be flickering like a dying candle.  But she is _kneeling_ , kneeling on knees, and only two of them.

Behind her, spiders are making cries of alarm and distress.  _“What is wrong with her shape?”_

_“We have spun her wrong.”  “A witch, a witch.”_

And then she does seem to have more legs, unless they are arms: she seems to have enough of a body that she can grab the nearest spider all at once, from above and underneath; and she has a mouth that is wide enough to fit the creature inside her, easily and furiously, a many-jointed leg, thorax and abdomen that she can only see like a huge, hairy shadow, the outline of a monster from a nightmare.

Inside her, it feels like nothing.

The spiders do not follow her when she runs.

 

*

 

She knows this place: the sunken lane lined with gnarled alders where once she had walked with Eöl, deeper and deeper into the hills that he had mined.  She knows the trees, some more verbal than others, but they seem now to shrink back from her touch.  She knows this place, but she cannot remember _why_ she knows this place, only anger and confusion like a great black cloud of malice – unless it is a black smog-cloud in truth, and she is only an empty space in its center.

She stands silently in the doorway of her husband’s hall, great wooden arches carving an elegant dome like the space beneath an uprooted tree.  She knows them from memory, but cannot see their color as she enters, only a hulking darkness glowing warm with the firelight within.

The great Hall is empty, and there is meat, on the fire, half-cooked.  She smells, but cannot feel, that it burns her.  Her fingers shake.   A bit of runny blood trickling down her wrist.  It tastes metallic, like the blood where she’s bitten her tongue.  This hunger is worse than bloodlust.  If she could eat the fire itself, she would.  And when it is gone, she turns on the bread, devouring it in a rhythm like that with which she had once kneaded it.  Eöl’s folk made their bread from acorns and groundnuts, and she’d found it bitter, those first days after her wedding.  But now she rips it apart with her hands, and cannot devour it fast enough.  It does nothing but make her more frantic.  She could eat this Hall, itself, she feels; she could start with the tables and move on to the walls.

She lifts a finger to her lips, and they are her lips, just as she has always known them.  It is her hand, just as it has always been.  But then it is not – it is three claws together, and wisps of a thousand hairs like nettle-stings.  The hazy reflection in the nearby window has too many legs, and then two again, flickering and irregular in her grey vision.  

Someone has rung the warning-bell that hangs high in the rafters of the hall.  It clangs through her new body like a monstrous heartbeat.  And she catches now the faint vibration, the hint of warmth that radiates from elf-bodies.  She can tell, even from here, that there are five of them, grabbing weapons and scrambling for back doors.

She stumbles out into the sunlight, following the scent of the escaped elves.  Their bodies are like sparks of light in the trees, and it is with eight legs that she stalks toward them.

 “The Noldo is back,” Eöl’s servants whisper in Sindarin, terror staining their voices, “she is back for her vengeance.”  Others cry: “A Spider, a Spider!” and still others, “A wraith, a wraith!”  They knock each other over as they flee.

 “ _I warned him_ ,” one elf says bitterly, and though she knows he is familiar to her, she cannot recognize him in this strange colorless world, under this aching rush of hunger and darkness.  She is hungry, she is _hungry._ It is beyond any food of the world.  She is spinning through space, desperate to grab something and it eat it if only to find something to hold on to.

But because this elf is the one who lingers to spit at her feet, she has time to catch him while his companions bolt away.  And she has pincers with which to snap at him, and spider-threads with which to tie him fast.

Then there are strong tree-branches around her, thick and cool and smooth, and a voice she knows, cool and wet in the husky air.  “Be still, love,” Alder whispers in a gentle tone like the wind in her leaves on a summer day, as Aredhel struggles uncomprehending and tries to push away with too many legs.  “Be still, now.  I have you.”  Alder is holding her as though she is the shape of an elf.  Alder is embracing her so tightly that she cannot twist away.

On the ground before them, an Avar with horrified eyes is backing away from them on all fours, the spider-threads that had held him fast dissipating on the wind.  He scampers away into the darkness.

She realizes that Alder isn’t only holding her, but has been tying something around her neck with deft fingers: a mandrake-amulet, like the ones the dwarves hang over their hearth-fires, but smaller and more intricate.  The root is held in place with a thin green line of living, endlessly looping vines, and woven around with leaves of rue and mugwort.  And it is not the mandrake that the dwarves cultivate in their careful gardens north of this Hall.  It is brighter and paler and she would know it anywhere, that root she’d once taken nervously and defiantly in the forests of Valinor. 

The world comes so sharply into color and focus that she feels herself fall stunned into Alder’s arms for a moment, spiderwebs dissipating from her body as though in a high wind, though the air is still.  Coming back into herself is more dizzying than the changes in her vision had been.  “But what happened.  What _happened._ ”

“You know how Spiders are made,” Alder reminds her, gently, in a voice like the soft creak of branches beneath ice.  And Alder is so bright!  Like those first trees as they marched into Beleriand, the sudden greenness after the empty cold.

“The spiders did not take me.  It was my husband.”  There had not been time to think about this.  There had not been time to process this.  “My _husband._ ”  First she’d forgiven him, and then he was dead, and now the lover who she had never thought to see again, is holding her.

 

( _“He meant no great wrong.  He was angry, and you hurt his pride more than his knife hurt me.”  For so they had thought.  “You are not the master of all Arda, that you may govern all as you please!_ _Endórë_ _was his land before it was ours.”  After living so long with her husband, the act of speaking Quenya sent an instinctive thrill of nervous energy down her spine, even here in her brother’s city where it was the common tongue._

_“Yet he has poisoned your mind indeed, if you do not think my word law in the city where I am king.”  Turgon held himself differently now, she noticed: his back straighter, his jaw clenched, in a way that reminded her of their grandfather.  “My heart is lighter than it has been in many years, to see you again – so you must understand how it grieves me to see violence against you, when you are returned to me beyond hope.”_

_“My_ husband _loves my_ son _.”  She emphasized the word because it made her heart clench, to hear him speak of her family as though they were not her own.  “He was fey with anger.  He did not mean it.  If only you would let me speak with him, he would tell me that he did not mean it.”  But as she spoke she stared out through the wide windows behind him, at the forget-me-nots in bright rings around the edges of fountains, and the whole garden-paths of low-growing thyme.  And she wondered whether she should ever see wild woods again._

_“Tell me truthfully, then: you married him by choice?_

_“_ Yes.  _How can you_ say _such a thing?”  How many times had she asked herself the same question?  And she had given herself the same answer.  “Or.  At least, I suppose I did.  It was… dark.”_

_“It was dark,” Turgon repeated incredulously.)_

“Your husband mixed spider-venom with the plants of the enemy.”  There is something in the tone with which Alder says _your husband_ that feels like a fist crushing Aredhel’s heart: not because of any jealousy there, but the utter lack of jealousy.  She remembers faintly that Alder had also once had a husband.  “For that was his barter with Spiders who make their home in these woods: he offers them elf-souls, now and again, and so they let him live in peace.  He knew the right poisons to force your fëa back into their webs.  And you,” Alder continues gently, “died with the holy protections of the Valar on your body, many times over.  It slowed the curse.  Fate indeed was on your side.”

She reaches up a hand and touches the mandrake amulet.  The plant-matter is distinctly _alive_ , not shriveled by its uprooted state like the one that the dwarves had taught her to make in Eöl’s hall.  It is flowering with petals that do not fall at her touch.  “How did you make – ”

“I _am_ an entwife; and if you cannot keep the Fire of Life inside your body, externally will have to do!  But be careful with that,” Alder scolds gently.  “It was not easy to acquire.  I may have gotten your brother’s gardener into some trouble.  They guarded it carefully, in your absence, you know.  The King of Gondolin knew how much you loved that plant, though you never told him why.  He tended it.  He kept it safe, and secret.”

She had not thought to ask.  There had not been time.

“Strange times we live in,” Alder says lightly, “that I should have to pillage your corpse.  But.  You had best keep these with you, as well.”  It is only now that Aredhel realizes that in one strong hand, Alder is holding both the little scrap of cloth that Vairë had once given her, and the little cloth bag of tengwar-stones that she had kept with her since Tirion.  She opens her mouth to speak, but her mind is reeling.  “Is that why,” she chokes out at last.  Is that why she is caught between spider and not-spider.

“You had the protection of the Weaver on you, as you died.  They could not quite out-spin her.”  She presses both items into Aredhel’s hands, and steps back.  “But I’m glad I found you when you did.  If you feed the Void, it grows.  The hröa takes its shape from the fëa; and so for the body to take on spider-shape, the fëa must be utterly corrupted by the Void.  The more the Spiders feed, the greater they grow.  As once you told me.”

Aredhel remembers again the vast, dark shape like a great mountain that had passed out of shocked and mournful Tirion like a whirlwind, grown monstrous and huge with its belly full of golden light. “I did not think that I was speaking of myself.”  Is this how her cousins felt, when they drew their swords in the starlight and swore to Eru – is this what shuddered through them, in ripples and gasps, a Void deeper and darker than she knew existed, a spiral of cold fire from the core of her being, a _wrongness_ that is in her skin but is not her skin, like the crawl of a spider, the knowledge of the gaping space between the stars that would inevitably claim her –

But Alder only takes her hand, and embraces her.  “I have lived with the spiders for many long years,” Alder says, “they have spun their webs in their hair.  I do not fear the body they have woven for you.  But for both our sakes, do not take that amulet off!”  And Alder is the tree that lines the bogs where elves and men are ensnared in the dark, and she is also the one who makes blood from her roots to feed the hungry marshes.  Her embrace is warm, the kind of warm that holds back grief: as Aredhel had once felt, huddling together with her siblings on the Grinding Ice.  And she thinks of the dwarf in the spider-lair, and the elf in Eöl’s hall, and she feels too nauseous to weep, and too repulsed to vomit; and yet somehow, Alder is still holding her.

And all at once she perceives that the reason that she is not now made into the Void personified, snaring prey to ease her cold and desperate hunger, is that Meássë had noticed her.  The great bloody-handed Huntress had thought she was worthy of carrying such a magical object of protection.  To think, she had once scorned that gift – that she had once thought endless battle to be too grim a fate!

It is Alder who breaks the embrace first, her voice fraught with worry.  “Írissë?  Írissë, _you were not meant to eat that!_ Is not the curse lifted?”

Aredhel has only taken the smallest piece from the tip of the mandrake- root, holding it apprehensively between her teeth.  It is at once biting and tough, like trying to chew on molten rock, and she winces.  But then she sings, a battle-song that she remembers her grandfather teaching them, an ancient song of blood and strife and hope that had been written as the first elves learned to defend themselves against the enemy’s shadows under the starlight by Cuiviénen.

Picking up on Aredhel’s intent, Alder joins in, and her voice is deep and dark as the shadowy edges of a bog, and their voices are raised like a keening for the hurts that have befallen this place, but also a praise of the gods of battle.

 

*

 

But then Alder is not there at all – only the wide clearing in front of Eöl’s hall where once they had sat to watch the stars.  And though Aredhel is naked but for the mandrake-amulet that the entwife had hung around her neck, she holds a knife in one hand and a spear in the other.

Watching her out of the darkness are two eyes, inky-dark with only a sliver of light.  And then a bear is prowling from the woods, like to the black bears that she and Eöl had once sat together in a tree to watch from a distance, but far larger.  The bear arches and stretches her back, then prowls forward with her legs wide and firm, body swaying, deliberate and graceful, great muscled shoulders hunched.  “But little elf,” asks Meássë in bear-form, “how do you offer me something no longer yours to give?  You are holding the threads to your own fate now.  What use have I, for a being who cannot die in my name and fly to my halls?  Do you say you act in thankfulness?  I say you act in fear.”  The bear is circling her as she speaks, slow and steady, shoulders back.

And the rush of shame she feels in that moment nearly throws her to her knees: shame that she had thought to honor Meássë’s gift to her when really she had nothing left to give in return; shame crawling inside her like the spider she had eaten; shame that somehow she _let this happen_ , though she could not say what she should have done differently.  “I act in nothing less than absolute gratitude,” she replies, and she keeps her chin high but her gaze lowered.

The black bear stands on her hind legs, chest thrust forward, and there is a white spot on her front in the shape of a crescent moon.

From the terrible ferocity and grace in the vala’s expression, Aredhel already knows that she is meant to fight, has no choice but to fight, and that she will lose.  She has miscalculated.  For just a few brief moments, she had thought herself saved from the worst of fates – she had felt, and been freed from, a darkness deeper than Mandos.  But she is going to die now – she is going to die here, under Meássë’s fierce gaze and sharp claws, she is going to be utterly unmade and neither Makar nor Mandos should keep her now.  And she thinks, still, this is all she ever could have done: that to repay so great a debt, and from such a source, that her life is a fair forfeit after all.

Meássë in bear-form has already lunged for her, awe-inspiring in her battle-rage.  And though automatically Aredhel shields herself with her long knife crossed over her spear, still this buys her only the fraction of an instant with which to step back and regain her footing, spear raised.

The bear moves with a thundering grace like iron and stone made into flesh, and her spear barely grazes the thick hide of its shoulder, drawing no blood, its handle twisted out of her hand with a casual swat of a great bear-claw.

It is Aredhel who is circling now, knife raised in her right hand, while Meássë lets out a terrible roar and does not back away.

Her next strike aims for the white moon on the creature’s chest.  Two huge, heavy paws knock her flat to her back, knife still clutched in her hand, a great snapping from within her ribcage, reverberating so sharp and painful through her abdomen that she knows beyond doubt that she is not dreaming.

In the moment that the bear tears out her throat with its teeth, she is struck by the vast terrible sinking feeling of knowing everything of inevitability and doom and being utterly unable to stop it.  Choking and gasping, she tries to swallow but cannot.  There is a warm flood of blood across her collarbone, and she thinks: _this is my end,_ and: _still it is better than to die like this than live endlessly as a Spider._

 

*

 

But Meássë is in elf-form, now, holding up to Aredhel’s lips a goblet of wine so dark it might be ink.  She has lips, and therefore it must be that she has a body.

 She drinks: and she catches the taste of mandrake with her soul rather than her tongue, and other plants too that she knows and loves: the cool borage that nods its blue heads in the sunlight and reminds her that hope indeed is _looking-up_ , and meadowsweet that steadies her unsure bones against the sudden shocking changes in her embodiment.  She stumbles as the effect of the wine hits her in the face like a hammerful of light.  And she sees, now, that she dressed in silver and white, as though she were hunting in the woods of Oromë when the world was younger.  A bow whose like she has never seen before, is strung at her back.

Before her is the door to a hall as tall and grim as Mandos itself, built of plain iron and unadorned, its roof so high that it is lost in the clouds overhead.  From within comes a sound of shouting, and the clash of metal, though the land outside is absolutely still: not a blade of grass movies, and the air is chill but windless.

With a ringing of trumpets, the doors are thrown open, and from within she catches a glimpse of bright shields hung from the walls, whose emblems she does not recognize.  And the red torchlight catches the glossy brightness of those shields, and in the center of the hall is the constant movement of hundreds of elves all sparring at once.  And a victory-song rises up from many of those inside, in voices fervent and solemn.  But these now part to make way for a host of elves arrayed in mail and cloaks of wolfskin and bearskin, and sat on horses greater and stronger than she has ever seen.  They carry weapons for hunting.

And there is Makar on his tall horse, clad in mail that is dark as the outer walls of his great Hall, and many bright warriors of the maiar whose like she has never before seen.  And Arakáno rides behind them, appearing to her as fierce and strong as he had in the battle that had taken his life.  And he smiles as exhilarated as that night when they’d first reached those northernmost stands of fir and pine and birch, where they’d finally had pine-needles for tea and enough wood for a proper bonfire again, and they’d sat out beneath the endless stars and watched the drunken reindeer frolic in the distance, and her little brother had dared to try one of the mushrooms that had made the deer inebriated.

 

_(“You are hiding something, brother,” she had said to him some days later.  “Don’t think I can’t see it.”  For after what was seemingly a thrilling night in Irmo’s realm, her youngest brother had aged more than he had in those long years on the Grinding Ice._

_And Arakáno had looked at once saddened and overjoyed.  “I would not want to cause any grief,” he had said, and then gone on a jovial rant about a vision of flying reindeer in the starlit sky.  “But you should know that I have looked down upon this country from above, now,” he had continued, “and we shall reach a calmer land, and a greener one, very soon.”_

_“What aren’t you telling me?” she had asked again, but he’d only shaken his head._

_“I would not want to upset Father,” he had protested.  “He has enough sorrow on his shoulders already.”_

_Arakáno had died fighting in his first battle as though he had done so many times before, fiercer and stronger than she could have imagined, his armor stained black with orc-blood, his smile vicious, laughing as he killed.  “You will not sit with me in Mandos,” were his last words, though whether they were directed to her father or her brothers was unclear.  And they had taken that as a prophecy of victory.  They had taken that as a statement of hope.  It had not occurred to them, that Arakáno was not now departing for Mandos at all.)_

 

Beside her brother, at the front of the train, is an empty horse.  And he gestures for her to mount, glad but solemn, and the horse allows her up as though it knows her well.  Arakáno puts a hand to her shoulder, his grip to be stronger than she remembers, and says “Well met, sister!  I had hoped to ride with you again.  It was a choice well-made.”  But for all his joy, there is a strange, determined detachment in his manner, and she feels it too: a resolute focus on the matter at hand; this is the time for Meássë and Makar’s great hunt, and not for family reunions, no matter how precious.

The mountains are dark and unearthly in the starlight, the wolves and bears of this land are like the memory of a distant dream, fierce and proud prey that roam the mountains on the edge of the World. The hunt seems to last many days: and as she sees, for the first time and many times after, Arien rising over Valinor, and her light makes the distant roof of Makar and Meássë’s iron hall glow golden-red.  And it is nothing like trailing after Oromë after all, great as he had been, on his horse that was tall as the trees, with his train of elves and maiar behind.  For she is _included_ , here.  She had not thought it could be like this!  And now Meássë signals and she fits an arrow to her string.  And the delight on her brother’s face when he sees her take down a great wolf with a single perfectly-aimed arrow, and the way he whoops and sings to himself as they race each other through the wide fields in between the black mountains, makes her heart ache.

When they return victorious, their trumpets on the air, the great doors of that somber hall open wide again to greet them.  And the hunting-party all rides inside, triumphant, to join in their comrades’ endless sparring once more – but when Aredhel nudges her horse to follow them, Meássë turns and shakes her head.  “No, little elf,” she laughs.  “Did you think I had killed you in truth?  I cannot out-weave Ungoliant.  And you may yet serve me well, from within the confines of Endórë.  Do not forget this day!  When the Dagor Dagorath comes, we will await you.”

Arakáno stays his horse before he rides inside.  “Until the ending of the world, then?” he asks, and though she’d thought the grief of his death healed, or at least numbed, now she does not answer for a moment, afraid that she will weep if she tries to speak.

“Until then, brother,” she says, and he rides back into the fray, to the rhythm of great war-drums pounding deep within.  And the iron doors close unfeeling behind him.

 

*

 

When she comes back to consciousness, Alder is holding her.  “Írissë?  Breathe.  Stay with me.”

The sunlight feels so bright that she squints and buries her face in that familiar shoulder and goes limp.  “It wasn’t a dream!” she exclaims, her voice muffled in Alder’s leaf-hair.  Too much has happened all at once; and she is not sure whether she would be ecstatic with the joy of riding in Meássë’s train and seeing her brother again, or weep for loss of her husband and the awful fear of Spiders, and so she does both.

Alder, too, is softly laughing and crying and embracing her all at once.  “I am sorry,” she keeps saying, “I am so sorry if I made this choice for you.  I know that you had mixed feelings about the Huntress’s gift – ”

“Sorry!  How can you be _sorry_?  I am here with you.”

But she is something else, now, something that feels like herself and yet is not the body she was born in at all, something she cannot quite understand, not-quite-elf, yet not spider either.  And so she does not dare reach out to her people again, but hunts alone in Meássë’s name; and when she travels together with Alder through the forests of Beleriand, the orcs flee from her, and so the trees are saved from their axes.

 

 

## Third Age, 3018, November

 

Their home by the shores of the Withywindle is built from living willows – or rather, Alder had asked the willows to grow together into a house for her wife, and they had given their permission for Aredhel to weave their branches into loose nets that grew into strong walls to keep the wind out.  The dwelling was woven with a roof high enough for Alder to come inside, though she had preferred to sleep under the stars.  In the summer, willow-leaves would make the whole dwelling shimmer white and silver, but now the branches of the roof are encrusted with ice.

Aredhel’s feet find their way to her old home, because she keeps thinking: _if I am there, If I am there, I will be warm again.  I have been warm there before.  If I am there, I will not feel so empty.  I have felt whole there, before._ But she is not sure what _whole_ means, in this fog of absolute darkness.  She feels herself carrying this same veritable darkness like a cloud, like a shroud, She repeats to herself: _if you feed the Void, if grows_.  But the Void in her feels as hungry and all-consuming as this veritable darkness that has covered her like a shroud, making birds shriek and flee with frightened eyes. 

She finds the stores of hazels and walnuts, carefully cracked and squirrelled away in little clay pots buried beneath the floor, and starts with those, and devours them like she is starving.  Her winter stores are gone before she realizes what she is doing.

Sometimes dogs will eat their dead masters in grief, or so she has been told.  She could have asked Fox about this.  She should have asked Fox about this!

Only when she is surrounded by empty clay pots strewn about the bed of dried wild-thyme and heath, does she even remember that there is someone called Fox.  But it is only a name, empty.  Again, she remembers Alder saying:   _If you feed the Void, it grows._

Alder is gone and she does not feel anything.  The place inside her that should be filled with grief, only feels darker and emptier than the spaces between the stars.  She can feel, but not see, her skin downy with those loathsome coarse spider-hairs.

The Withywindle runs slow here, lined with tall reeds that have faded to yellow.  Sluggish, frigid water churns beneath half-formed sheets of ice.  In places, the little streams that flow down the river-bank, half-buried by frozen leaves, have burst forth in great chunks of ice-crystals like her husband’s new-mined jewels had looked, majestic and bright and untamed.

She kneels down to drink the water that is like liquid ice, shivering and nearly retching at its biting cold.  Her two hands, dipping into the slow-moving water, are elf-hands: slender and brown, still adorned with two silver rings.  But there is something about the joints of her knuckles, or the shadows cast by the trees above her, something spider-like, grossly articulate.  _If you feed the Void, it grows._

That strange iridescent gleam signals something alive beneath the water.  Her hand reaches in and snatches a whole live eel.  She eats that too, whole and angry and unfeeling _(but, if you feed the Void, it grows!)_ ; and when she looks up, scales smeared across her lips, there is Hawthorn.

Hawthorn shakes the flowers out of her eyes, white stained with what should be pink but looks only grey as stone, and her tough little fruits rattle against each other like an anxious heartbeat.  As she holds out a hand, she carefully directs her gaze down.  “Írissë?”  Hawthorn makes the same casual movement that Alder once made to part the spider-threads that Aredhel has begun to leave behind herself in a sticky trail; and they clear like wisps of cloud on a high wind.  “Írissë?  What has happened?  If you could only tell us what became of Alder…”

Aredhel stares at the hand, seeing only a faint beam of brightness in the dark.

“What _became_ of Alder!  Alder trusted the hobbits, axes and fires and all!  Alder married an elf who had already been taken by the Spiders.  Alder trust too much.  That is what became of her.  _I warned Alder.”_ Oak’s voice is a low, threatening croak like a frozen tree that creaks in a winter storm; but it is heavy with grief.  “I warned her of this.  But she only said: my flesh is strong and does not burn!”  When the hobbits had come into the forest, Alder had formed a tight ring of alder-trees around the fire, containing it with their resistant bark.  Aredhel knows that she felt fierce pride and love and fear in that moment, but she cannot remember what any of those things are.

Aredhel tries to find her voice.  “I am only so cold,” she says, because it is all she can think.  “Please.  I only do not want to be cold tonight.”  Willow and Elm and Oak are both looking right _into_ her eyes in a way that, Spider-curse or no curse, makes her skin feel like the crawl of insects.  Hawthorn is bent with her head bowed, as though deep in concentration, and Aredhel can feel her reaching out to her, nonverbally, the way the ent-wives speak to the trees who have no voices.  She tries to tell Hawthorn _I think this is because I lost my amulet_ or _I know I care what became of Alder but I can’t seem to think about anything but the hunger and the cold_ but all she can see inside herself is inky blackness, darker than the spider-poisons that had once taken all the waters of Nan Dungortheb, darker than Ungoliant’s cloud that had once shrouded Morgoth from the eyes of Meássë and Makar.

“You see.”  The silvery bottoms of Willow’s leaves meld with the misty grey light in the sky and make her look taller than she is.  “She is already gone.  She is not our responsibility.”  Willow’s mane of flexible branches of long, thin leaves, scattered full of soft, downy white flowers, is thicker than the other ent-wives’; and unlike them, she does not try to clothe herself, even in flowers.  Her body almost elf-shaped but her skin as deeply textured and creviced as old willow-bark.

“I am sorry for my friend, and for the love she found in the marshes of Nevrast.  And I sorrow for what the hobbits have unleashed!”  Oak’s acorns held in pairs like jewels in a crown, thick leaves layered together like armor.  “But, we must protect the Forest.”

“We might bring her to Tom Bombadil.”  Hawthorn is still leaning down slightly to face Aredhel, and the angle makes her many branches seem to stream out behind her like a tree that has grown in strong wind. 

“Tom Bombadil!” both Oak and Elm scorn in unison.

To hear them speaking of her as though she is not there, feels achingly, horribly familiar, as though she is an elfling chewing at the sides of her hands and staring out the window while her family discuss her like a dog who must be exercised.  _I am right here_ , she had always wanted to shout, and sometimes had.  But if she were right here, she should be able to meet their eyes and hug them and understand what to say and when to say it.

And now the ent-wives are crowding in on her in a way that makes her instinctively back up away from the river, toward the Hedge.  A few half-sleeping trees twist back and forth in confusion, as though unsure of whose side to take.

She runs.  They don’t seem to be following.  She runs like a cloud of darkness, a darkness that seems to ooze from her pores like sweat.  She cannot see, and she does not need to, and she climbs the Hedge with spider-threads that are strong as rope.

 

*

 

She hides in the bracken that reaches nearly to her shoulders, and a horrible dark fog has settled on the land around her, like Morgoth’s fumes had once taken Beleriand in the youth of the world.  Beneath the oaks on the edge of Willowbottom, thick lobed leaves are layered together against the ground like armor, freezing into the ice at the sides of the half-frozen Shirebourne river.  She sits with her feet half-buried in those leaves like sand on a beach, and listens to the sound of the stream trickling sluggishly over fallen logs.  Her hair has begun to snarl so that twigs catch in it.  She reaches down with one spider-leg and touches the surface of the river, watching the water ripple.  Her reflection is only a cloud of shadow, the space behind her only an agonizingly bright light.

The gaping void inside her is like those split places in the tree-bark where a rot is starting to set in.  It is hard to make an alder sicken, but the hobbits’ new mills have sent swathes of woodchips and waste into the water, and it has begun to cloud in places.  The bark curls back, and underneath is water-soaked and black.

She builds a web high up in a hawthorn tree and nestles into the center.  The tree is at once familiar and not-familiar, and it shakes its great branches like disgruntled shrugging of shoulders, but the spider-threads are so soft, and lying on her belly she can look down through the tree’s branches.  The moonlight catches in the silks.  The wildlife are keeping away from this spot.

She watches the stars, and only thinks: _I could eat those too, only I could reach them._   And: _when will it not be cold anymore._ She keeps searching inside her for grief or for loss or for what is going on, but all she can feel is hunger and cold.

And sometimes she remembers, as though from very far away: _If you feed the Void, it grows._

But that night she catches three crows, and eats them, bones and all.

 

*

 

“There, there,” she croons, quietly, in Quenya, holding out a handful of pine-boughs.  “I mean you no harm.”  The goat stills.  She can hear its heart, faintly, beating through its rough hide.  “No fear, darling.”  The animal’s eyelids relax, and it begins to nibble contentedly.  They are huddled together in its shack in the wide meadow between the Hedge and its owner’s hobbit-hole, glad of each other’s warmth.  She wants to nuzzle against the creature, to embrace it, but her hröa is like a mirage flickering on the edge of consciousness, sometimes an elf, sometimes the ghost of a spider.  She is afraid to break the animal’s trust, and more afraid to trust her own.  Sometimes she remembers _If you feed the Void, it grows_ , and sometimes she feels that the cold Void inside of her could shatter her into shards of broken glass, and that she would eat those too.

She lays down a handful of pine-boughs, and the goat begins to munch hungrily.  The hay-stores have been running thin: large wagons have carried much of the animal-feed away East with most of the pipe-weed; and many fields have rotted unharvested while the chief’s men gave the orders for building over farming.  Some of the Brandybucks took to letting their animals graze in the Forest.  It came to that.

The huorns took a few.  They were not the only ones.  She remembers lunging onto a young sheep that the hobbits begrudgingly sent into the farthest field along the Hedge to graze.  _No fear,_ she had told it very quietly, in Quenya, then bit its throat out with her teeth, in an instant.

It isn’t a blood-thirst, though, really: if someone held three shining jewels in an outstretched hand, no doubt she would attempt to devour them.

 _There is a wild hag in the woods, who eats your goats and spits out the bones._ She’s heard that story, told around hobbit campfires, while she curled silently in the branches of a nearby huorn.  “I’ve seen her m’self,” the hobbit announced viciously.  He was one of the Chief’s, smug as a dragon, the dark circles beneath his eyes from long days of felling trees, splitting the wood, laying foundations of stone.

“Oh, lay off,” said another.  “It’s you as got us into this mess.” She could smell the meat roasting over their fire, a thick, earthy scent, like mushrooms rising from new earth.  The huorn purrs gently beneath her, wordless, tolerant of her presence, but no longer able to voice an objection.  An oak, old and strong; but her green acorns will be mute trees.

“I’ve seen ‘er!” the hobbit repeated, sternly.  “Crawling through the night, and pouncing on my own sheep, she did, like a cat.  Ripped the throat clean out, just like that.  I chased after her, I did, with my axe drawn.  But she slinked back down toward the marshes with the sheep over her shoulder.  A bleeding mess.”

“Chased her!” another of the hobbits chortled.  “Ye came running into my hole, locked the door, and would not go out again ‘til the sun was up.”

“It’s we as woke her,” says a third hobbit, low and menacing.  “You saw it.  No one else to blame.  We cut the alder-tree as shouldn’t be touched, just as we were warned.”

“Fairy-stories!” his companion snorted.

This angered her for some reason she could not explain, caught in this achingly empty twilight, where all she can seem to think is _I am so empty, I am so cold._

And in the darkness of the little goat-shed she weaves herself a bed with threads that seem sometimes to come from elf-hands and sometimes from the wildly flickering spider-form inside of her.

The goat, shivering but unresisting, she binds in tight spider-threads, and then nestles herself into her own silky bed, her whole body tensed against a gaping emptiness as though the sky is falling.  The shed is masked in shadow.

The door is thrown open, and gloom disperses like smog into the bright dawn-light.  The tall, elf-shaped figure in the doorway there blocks out the watery sunrise on the horizon behind him, but his figure itself is _bright_ , too bright.  She thinks she knows his smell, and the tiny sound of the earrings in his ears clinking together.  She scuttles backwards.  He shines like the sun.

 

 

## Time of the Trees, 1390

 

“You have learned to read and write with my husband’s tengwar,” Nerdanel says, “but I have been working with their other uses.  See!”  And amid sculptures unfinished and the delicate glass beads intended to adorn her husband’s jewelry, are also flat stones onto which were painted each tengwa in her impeccably graceful handwriting.  “I have been experimenting with them.”  Nerdanel gestures to a basket of round sections of birch-bark, one painted with each tengwa.   “In the manner that your mother uses tea-leaves, and as the first elves used elk-bones in their fires on the shores of Cuiviénen.  I can prophecy in the way that only mothers can, for we are bound up so closely in the threads of out children’s fates.  But it seemed to me that once such a collection of symbols have taken on a definite set of meanings, it is a practical way of asking for wisdom in all manner of matters.  There is a power in _alphabets_ : for they give physical form to spoken en-chant-ment.”

Though Nerdanel never makes any sign of displeasure that she has been given seven sons, certainly she always brightens at the sight of her eldest niece scampering in through the back door, Celegorm and Curufin in tow.  And often when her cousins have wandered off to their own pursuits, Aredhel stays with her aunt for long hours, learning all that the other elf is willing to teach her of pottery and beadwork and how to call Irmo for guidance on the path of dreams.

On the wall hang a few surreal paintings in bright colors, depicting combinations of tengwar painted here one on top of the other.  Half-formed sculptures of copper wire, depicting still more letters are arranged in a ring on a nearby table.  “I am still working to design a system with fire – when Aulë would visit my father, he would say: _but_ all _fire is the Fire of Life_.  And metalsmithing, like any art, is a prayer,” Nerdanel explains, with the cool authority of the daughter of the one of the Noldor’s greatest smiths, and the wife of the other.  “When you heat a metal until it is pliable enough that it may be worked, truly you are asking Aulë to make the metal something that can be re-formed to your will.  You are asking his energy to move inside your body, so that You are the Forger, the Re-Maker.  But when you throw a thing into the fire, where does it go?”

The question sounds rhetorical, but Aredhel does not know if the answer is supposed to be _Aulë,_ or _the ashes_ , or _it’s just gone._

“But for now, here, it was my husband’s mother who wove that, and so Fate is woven into it well enough.”  The bag is embroidered in a pattern like the many-rayed star of Finwë’s emblem, yellows and reds and golds.  The stitching is so fine that the star almost seems to move, like a never-ending swirl into a burst of light.  The bag rattles as she lifts it.

But now Nerdanel tips the bag onto the hearth, this set of tengwar being made of thin rounds of wood, smaller than pennies.  She runs a hand over the overturned pieces, then pulls it back.  Aredhel can feel a wisp of the same sort of invisible light that connects hearts in osanwë, radiating from her aunt’s hand.  “Now,” she says, businesslike, “what is it that you would like to know?”

In front of her rather intimidating aunt, she does not want to ask, _is it wrong to marry Celegorm if I do not love him_?  “Where will I find love,” she says instead.  “Or, how will I find love?”  All at once, she feels very small and shy.

Nerdanel is at once kind and serious.  The prayer she speaks is one that Aredhel remembers her own mother teaching her, in praise of Vairë who holds all the threads of the World.  She scatters the tengwar across the hearth.  Though her gaze is focused, she quickly takes one with sure and certain fingers, and holds it up to the light.  “ _Ungwë_.”  She pauses.  “And this, of course, is why divination is also poetry.  If I saw _hwesta_ , the breeze, I might say: _it is by Manwë’s will that you might find love_ , or I might think of the poem that says: _wind is the source of every voice_.  But _ungwe_ , that is spider’s web, is its own kind of fate, or the power to obstruct fate.  A thing that is woven to block out the light.  Woven it is, but not by the Weaver.”

Before she can say more, there is the sound of laughter muffled conversation approaching from the nearby staircase.  Maedhros pauses in the doorway, and she can see her eldest brother peering over his shoulder.

“Oh, there you are!”  Nerdanel says.  “Come in for a moment, won’t you?  Írissë needs the practice.”

Maedhros smiles good-naturedly.  “ _Another_ of these?  Alright.”  He gives Aredhel a conspiratorial sort of smile, politely not meeting her eyes.  “Better it be than last time, when we were made to stand in each corner of the room while she cast her stones on every surface.  Most recently, she pulled _halla_ and _noldo_!  I _am_ glad we have an intricate system of artistic symbolism to confirm that I’m a tall noldo.”  He sits on the floor beside them, splayed with one knee drawn up to his chest, the other leg stretched out long before him, and Fingon settles down beside him.  Her brother has borrowed one of Maedhros’s tunics with Fëanor’s emblem embroidered onto it.  She wonders whether her uncle would be honored or enraged by this.  The shirt is slightly too big for him, and she notices that the gold ribbons plaited into his hair are suspiciously loose.

“Truly, I have been blessed with the kindest and most patient of sons!”  Nerdanel says, her eyes full of the same gentle teasing.  “But of course – it is best to test a compass when you know which way is North.  Go on, then.”  She gestures toward the tengwar on the hearth.

Aredhel hesitantly scoops them back up into the bag.  “What is it, then, that you wish to know?”  The texture of the fabric of the bag is very grounding against her hands, silky and cool.

Maedhros hesitates for several moments, wearing the same look that she has seen on his face in Finwë’s high court when he clearly wants to speak but does not want to offend.

Outside, the lights of the Laurelin and Telperion have begun to mingle, casting splintering prisms of multicolored light through the open windows.  Aredhel has begun to absentmindedly chew at the side of one of her knuckles, and lowers her hand before Fingon can scold her.  Finally, she suggests: “You’re not telling me, because you don’t want to say it in front of your _amil_.”

“Perhaps.”  Maedhros raises one eyebrow.  “But if the Gods guide you correctly, I will surely let you know.  For the sake of my amil’s research, of course.” Maedhros is absentmindedly stretching against his outstretched leg, but stares intently down at the tengwar that she has spread out before them, as though trying to recognize a face through fogged glass.  From the angle at which he sits, the mingled treelight throws a soft rainbow of colored light across the freckles on his cheeks.

She repeats the same prayer that Nerdanel had used earlier.  Aredhel does not know what she expects: but the moment she finishes speaking, her hand moves automatically toward the proper piece, like a gentle tug inside her bone marrow, guiding the way.  She holds it up, faintly warm from the heat of the nearby fire.  Fingon is sitting with his chin leaned on Maedhros’s shoulder, watching her shrewdly.  “ _Anga_.”

There is a thoughtful pause, in which Maedhros stares pensively into the fireplace behind her and doesn’t say anything.

“For science?” Nerdanel asks pointedly.  “Or in poetry.  You could give us an abstraction.  Iron, as a metaphor, for…?”

He shakes his head.  “I can’t even fathom what that might signify.”

Aredhel laughs and scoops the tengwar back up into their bag again. “It’s all right.  It seems true love now awaits me in a spider’s web.”

They notice another elf peering curiously in through the door.

“Curvo, get in here!”  Maedhros calls, laughing.  “Mother is teaching Írissë to read our destinies.  And they’re _dreadful_.”

Curufin takes it very stoic and calculating.  His mother molds the world out of clay and glass and paint; Curufin is as sharp and calculating and _literal_ as a lorebook.  He has absorbed many of his father’s theories about the Fire of Life and the Power of Treelight, thin and pretentious as they sound coming from a fifteen-year-old.  “I imagine that the angle at which you are sitting, plays a role,” he says.  “The sounds of Old Noldorin are more closely based in natural phenomenon, which would make the prayer more effective.”  His mother nods at him very seriously.

He insists that Aredhel create an elaborate sequence of nearly the entire alphabet, arranged between them, as he asks for clarification on each stone and refuses to share his original question.

Outside the wide windows, Telperion’s silvery light has taken over the sky.  “We should be leaving soon,” Fingon says quietly.  “It is getting late.”

Nerdanel’s gaze darkens as she catches his meaning.  “This is _my_ home as well,” she says firmly.  “If I say that you are welcome here, then welcome you are.”

From the look on her brother’s face as he hesitates, she suspects that Fëanor has been unkind to him recently; the smiling, easy atmosphere of the room has gone tense.

“Take these with you, at least.”  Nerdanel presses the bag of tengwar into her palm.  “Acquaint yourself with them, and show them to your mother.  Maybe it will be one of you, who devises the best system with which to work with them.  And do be careful of spiders!”


End file.
